1917–1986 · Chicago newspaper columnist, drama critic and essayist
Born in London in 1917 and raised in the United States from the age of five, Sydney J. Harris started at the Chicago Herald and Examiner at seventeen and spent his career at the Chicago Daily News from 1944 until the paper folded in 1978, then at the Chicago Sun-Times until his death in 1986. His weekday column, “Strictly Personal,” ran in roughly 200 papers across the United States and Canada, and he published eleven books. His signature form was the compressed aphorism — a whole argument folded into one sentence — which is exactly the shape of the raindrop line, and exactly the shape that survives being cut loose from its author.