Harris, Thomas

Born in Tennessee , but spent his childhood with his family in Mississippi , in the cities of Rich, Cleveland and Clarksdale. In 1964 he graduated from Baylor University in Waco , Texas , with a major in English. During college, he worked as a reporter for the local newspaper The Waco Tribune-Herald (according to other sources in the News-Tribune) following the footsteps of police patrols. In college, he met his future wife Harriet. Subsequently, their daughter Anne was born, but in the sixties they divorced.

After graduating, Harris traveled around Europe for a while. In 1968 he moved to New York to work at the Associated Press , where he served until 1974 . His work at the Associated Press gave him invaluable experience with the world of crime.

The death of eleven Israeli athletes in Munich at the 1972 Olympics prompted Harris to write Black Sunday , a bestseller in 1975 . He talks about the plans of a terrorist group to capture the airship , deploy shrapnel bombs there and undermine the Super Bowl . The book was also filmed starring Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern . The success of the book allowed Harris to devote himself entirely to writing.

Harris's next book is The Red Dragon . Because of the writer's love for detail, the novel was released only in 1981 . This is the first book where Dr. Hannibal Lecter appears. She also became a bestseller and was twice filmed: the first time in 1986 ("The Manhunter " dir. M. Mann , starring William Petersen , Brian Cox , Tom Nunen ) and the second in 2002 ("The Red Dragon " dir. Brett Ratner , starring Edward Norton , Anthony Hopkins , Rafe Fiennes ).

The greatest success and the greatest fame for Thomas Harris brought his second book about Dr. Lecter “ Silence of the Lambs ”, released in 1988 and filmed by director Jonathan Demmey in 1991 .

In 2013, Thomas Harris said that he was inspired by a prison doctor from the Mexican city of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon. This became known from the writer's preface to the new edition of “Silence of the Lambs,” dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the book. Excerpts from the preface published in The Times. Nevertheless, Harris did not reveal the name of the doctor, preferring to call him the fictitious name "Dr. Salazar" ^[1] .

Due to Harris’s same craving for details, the third book about Dr. Lecter, Hannibal , was published in 1999 and filmed by director Ridley Scott in 2001 . E. Hopkins again played Dr. Hannibal Lecter , Jodie Foster refused to play the role of Clarice Starling, and this role was given to Julianne Moore .

In 2004, Harris signed a contract with Bent Books for two books. The first of these was Hannibal: Ascension , which tells of the early years of young Hannibal from six to twenty years. The novel is designed to shed light on the circumstances of the death of the Lecter family during the Second World War and focuses on the memoirs of Dr. Lecter about his younger sister - Misha (in the original - Mischa). The book was published abroad on December 5, 2006 , and the film of the same name was released at the Russian film distribution on February 8, 2007 . So far, there have been no official statements about the contents of Harris’s next, fifth novel about Hannibal Lecter. But it is assumed that he will continue the doctor’s young history.

Thomas Harris co-wrote the script for the television series Hannibal , which aired on the US NBC channel from 2013 to 2015. A lot of characters from the series of books about Dr. Lecter appear in the series.

• Black Sunday (1975)
• Red Dragon (1981)
• The Silence of the Lambs (1988)
• Hannibal (1999)
• Hannibal: Ascension (2006)
• Kari Mora (2019)

Thomas Harris in the library of Maxim Moshkov