HotmailCoroner: Heart disease killed author Harris
54-year-old died of natural causes while promoting his latest novel
 Jonathan Fickies / Getty Images file Author E. Lynn Harris, a New York Times best-selling author, died July 23 at age 54. |
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LOS ANGELES - A coroner's official says heart disease, complicated by high blood pressure and a hardening of the arteries, is what killed author E. Lynn Harris last week.
County coroner Craig Harvey said Wednesday that the 54-year-old died of natural causes. Harris died July 23 while visiting Los Angeles to promote his latest novel, “Basketball Jones.”
Harris lived in Atlanta and was considered a pioneer of gay black fiction, enjoying unprecedented success in the genre. He wrote 11 novels, and 10 of them became New York Times best-sellers.
He won numerous awards, including Novel of the Year by the Blackboard African-American Bestsellers Inc. for “Just As I Am” and the Lambda Literary Award for the anthology “Freedom in This Village.”
More than 4 million of his books are in print.
Harris was born in Flint, Mich., and was raised in Little Rock, Ark. He sold computers for a living before he quit his sales job and wrote his first novel, “Invisible Life.” He published it himself in 1991 and sold it at black-owned book stores, salons and book clubs before being found by Anchor Books, according to his Web site.
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