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FIRST NOVEL
Sweet Success With a nudge from his creative writing professor, Nathan Harris authors a first novel of critical acclaim before turning 30 BY MATT COOPER
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athan Harris had written what he felt was a clever little story—he had given the narrator this “very outthere voice,” he recalls—and he presented it to creative writing professor Jason Brown with satisfaction. Brown read for a few minutes, and then a wry smile crossed his face. “This is a fine story,” he told Harris, “but it isn’t you.”
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“He hit the nail on the head,” says Harris, BA ’14, recalling the exchange years ago in Brown’s intermediate fiction class. “Finding your voice as a writer is hard. He guided me toward my voice.” Following Brown’s advice, Harris—then an undergraduate English major—concentrated instead on the sweeping tale that was almost writing itself in his head: a Civil War-era story of slave brothers at the moment of the Emancipation Proclamation, an expansive account that pulled Harris into exploring the deep waters of race and racism, power, love, and homosexuality. Upon reading Harris’s early working pages, Brown knew he was holding something special. “I saw fantastic writing that was the beginning of a long project, and all I did was encourage him,” he says. “I could see flame there.” That flame became The Sweetness of Water, a novel of critical acclaim accentuated by the fact it is Harris’s first, written before
he turned 30. He credits Brown and the creative writing program for helping him commit to an epic undertaking that one reviewer described as “unwriting Gone with the Wind,” destroying phony representations of romanticism and race. Blending historical fiction and a cast of rich, complex characters, Harris tells the story of two freedmen and a Georgia farmer who forge an alliance that alters their lives forever. Running parallel to their relationship is a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers, all set against the backdrop of a violent, prejudiced town. Published last March, The Sweetness of Water quickly became a New York Times bestseller and was declared “miraculous” by the Washington Post. It’s an Oprah’s Book Club pick and a recommendation on former president Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021 list. The novel was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and
LAUREL SAGER
Nathan Harris, whose first novel The Sweetness of Water became a bestseller and critical success
