LOS ANGELES — E. Lynn Harris, a pioneer of gay black fiction and a literary entrepreneur who rose from self-publishing to best-selling status, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 54.
Publicist Laura Gilmore said Harris died Thursday night, but a cause of death had not been determined. She said Harris, who lived in Atlanta, fell ill on a train to Los Angeles a few days ago and blacked out for a few minutes, but he seemed fine after that and was at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills on Thursday night.
Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said only that a man matching Harris’ name and date of birth had died Thursday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which was confirmed by hospital spokeswoman Simi Singer. Gilmore said an autopsy would be performed Monday or Tuesday.
An improbable and inspirational success story, Harris worked for a decade as an IBM executive before taking up writing and selling his novel “Invisible Life” from his car as he visited salons and beauty parlors around Atlanta.
He had unprecedented success for an openly gay black author, and his strength as a romance writer led some to call him the “male Terry McMillan.” He went on to mainstream success with works such as the novel “Love of My Own” and the memoir “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.”
His writing fell into several genres, including gay and lesbian fiction, African-American fiction and urban fiction. But he found success in showing readers a new side of African-American life: the secret world of professional, bisexual black men living as heterosexuals.
His 1994 debut, “Invisible Life,” was a coming-of-age story that dealt with the then-taboo topic. “If you were African-American and you were gay, you kept your mouth shut and you went on and did what everybody else did,” he said. “You had girlfriends, you lived a life that your parents had dreamed for you.”
Harris published 11 novels, 10 of which were on The New York Times best-seller list. More than 4 million copies of his books are in print, according to his publisher, Doubleday.
