Often described as a gifted interviewer, she contributed to many other national magazines and newspapers. The Harrisons divorced in 1968 after eight years of marriage.
Her first book, "Unlearning the Lie: Sexism in School" (Liveright, 1969), grew out of the children's experiences with efforts to quell sexism at what was then the Woodward Park School in Brooklyn. They returned to Brooklyn with their two children, and she wrote that she thought of herself as "one of those furtive, silly housewives with a novel under her apron." He took a job with CARE, and they lived in Libya, India and Guatemala.
In her autobiography, "An Accidental Autobiography" (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), she wrote, "I read Sartre in my late teens and made the mistake of taking him seriously."Īfter leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses, she moved to the East Village and worked as a secretary at a publishing house and at the American Committee on Africa. "I think the two things were going on simultaneously: the religion encouraged something it was bound to squash," she said. When asked in an interview in "Contemporary Authors" how she could reconcile this ambition with the tenets of the Jehovah's Witnesses, she suggested that the religion's images of the watery creation of the world and its imminent bloody destruction stimulated her imagination. She wrote of an extremely disorganized family, and of a father who sexually abused her and once tried to kill her.Īs a young teenager, Barbara already knew she wanted to be a writer. Her father, a printer, and her brother, Richard, did not become Jehovah's Witnesses, creating a deep fault line in the household. She grew up in various Brooklyn neighborhoods, mainly Bensonhurst. She portrays the religion as racist, sexist and totalitarian, but also details members' kindness to one another, their care for the elderly and their courage in the face of persecution.īarbara Grizzuti was born in Jamaica, Queens, on Sept. "Visions of Glory" mixes her autobiography with detailed historical research. At 19, she went to live and work at its world headquarters, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in Brooklyn Heights.Īfter three years there, she renounced the faith and left. Harrison was converted to the Jehovah's Witnesses faith by her mother when she was 9 she went door to door carrying its message. In The New York Times Book Review, Vivian Gornick said "Visions of Glory" was "quite well written, contains a mass of absorbing information, and the personality of its author is extremely appealing."
With "Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses" (Simon & Schuster), she became nationally known her later work, mostly nonfiction, usually received excellent reviews. What followed was a successful self-education and a blossoming into a multifaceted writer of literate travel books, many essays and reviews, and a novel. The turning point in her life and career was her decision, at 22, to leave the Jehovah's Witnesses, which forbade a college education. She once wrote that for years she smoked six packs of cigarettes a day. The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said her daughter, Anna Harrison. She was 67 and lived in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Author and Essayist, Dies at 67īarbara Grizzuti Harrison, who emerged as a popular, prolific writer of keenly observed nonfiction with a 1978 book about the dozen years she spent as a Jehovah's Witness, died on Wednesday at a hospice in Manhattan.