Corra Mae Harris

Corra Mae Harris (March 17, 1869 – February 7, 1935), was an American writer and journalist. She was one of the first women war correspondents to go abroad in World War I.

Corra Mae White was born in Elbert County, Georgia, March 17, 1869, the daughter of the Confederate veteran Tinsley Rucker White (1843-1930) and Mary Elizabeth Matthews (1846-1890). Her grandfather was a State senator (1853–54) named William Bowling White (1811-1858). He owned 46 enslaved women, children and men in the 1830 U.S. census and 33 in 1860. Her father, at age 17, owned five enslaved human beings, who were emancipated by the federal government three years later.

A stone monument marks her birthplace, the ancestral plantation of the White Family, who arrived November 11, 1792, and began growing tobacco in the region south of Ruckersville. The marker, on Highway 72 to the east of Elberton, reads: "Farm Hill: Girlhood Home of Corra Harris."

Her great-great-grandfather, Thomas White, and his second wife, came from a tobacco plantation along the Rapidan River at White's Ford north of Scuffletown, near the intersection today of Greene and Orange Counties in Piedmont Virginia. He was the son of John White (1696-1787), the emigrant of Leicestershire, England, who was granted 235 acres from King George, in 1738, in Orange County. He later purchased 356 acres, part of the Octonio Grant, signed by the father of future president, James Madison, on the banks of the Rapidan River that included White's Ford.

Corra White had a formal education limited to teacher training at nearby female academies, though she never graduated from any of the schools she attended.

In 1887 she married Methodist minister and educator Lundy Howard Harris (1858–1910). They had one child survive to adulthood, a daughter named Faith (1887–1919). For roughly two decades Harris struggled through various personal tragedies, including a troubled marriage; the death of two infant sons; scandal and humiliation surrounding the abandonment, betrayal, and return of her husband in 1898 and his public confessions of adultery; the financial destitution resulting from the loss of his teaching position at Emory College; his suicide in 1910; her daughter's death in 1919; and her sister's death shortly after that. Harris remained a widow until her death 25 years later.

Harris was, for a time, the most widely known woman from the state of Georgia. Her literary reputation during her life and legacy since are connected with A Circuit Rider's Wife published in 1910. Reputedly autobiographical, the novel is at most a spiritual autobiography, with little else that resembles her actual life.

She wrote more than two dozen books, nineteen of which were published. Two were autobiographies, one a travel journal, and two became feature-length movies, the best known was I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, released in 1951 and inspired by, A Circuit Rider's Wife. The other was the 1920 film Husbands and Wives. She published over 200 articles and short stories, and well over a thousand book reviews.