Erica Harth
Author Bio.
Erica Harth grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, the setting of her mystery novel Red Hill Blues. Like her protagonists, she was a teenager in the 1950s, and she attended the Croton public schools. Although there is no one-to-one correspondence between her characters and real Crotonites, much of the novel is based on her personal experience of the McCarthy era in a small village with a sizable population of leftists.
Erica has said that she had always wanted to write about Croton. By the 1950s, when she was a teenager there, Croton had a rich, variegated past. Croton was home to Italian and Irish immigrants who in the nineteenth century helped build the Croton Dam, long New York’s city’s sole source for water. Immigrants also helped build the New York Central Railroad (now Metro-North). Because the Harmon Station, located in the Harmon section of Croton, is a major express stop on the line, railroad employees still live in the village. Many commuters to New York City have made Croton their home, and descendants of the nineteenth-century immigrant workers have formed a large portion of Croton’s working class.
The artistic, “bohemian,” leftist crowd started migrating to Croton in the early twentieth century when the real estate developer Clifford Harmon founded an artists’ colony in the section of Croton that bears his name. During Prohibition the Nikko Inn, built by Harmon on the banks of the Croton River, became a speakeasy frequented by Hollywood and Broadway stars and pleasure-seekers of all kinds. After the repeal of Prohibition, it was used by a cult psychiatrist who drew his patient-followers to the area.
This history finds its way into “Red Hill Blues,” as it did into the texture of Erica’s life in Croton. By the time she lived there, former Communists, leftists, and artists who had lived or visited there had become the stuff of legend: John Reed, Max Eastman, Robert Minor, Gloria Swanson, Isadora Duncan, and many others.
From an early age Erica heard a lot of talk about politics at home. But she herself did not get politicized until the Vietnam War. She became active on the Columbia University campus when she was a graduate student there in the 1960s. A New York newspaper even photographed her teaching on the lawn outside her classroom building—a rear view—during the famous strike and occupation of 1968. That spring, when she earned her doctorate in French literature, she attended the counter-commencement in Morningside Park (it was a beautiful day).
Erica’s teaching career includes her years as a graduate assistant and assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, a year at the University of Tel Aviv, a long career at Brandeis University, from which she retired in 2006 with the title of Professor of Humanities and Women’s Studies. After her retirement she taught at Massachusetts’ state prison for women, MCI Framingham, and for the Massachusetts Literacy Project in a local library.
Her bibliography includes several scholarly books and numerous articles on early modern France. She also compiled and edited a set of original essays on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, to which she contributed an essay and the Introduction (Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans; New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2001-03). This book grew from her experience of living at Manzanar, one of the ten so-called relocation centers for the ethnic Japanese, in 1944-45. Her mother was working as a social worker there, and Erica attended first grade at the camp’s school. Erica has also published several personal essays on the subject. In 2007, a short story of hers related to Red Hill Blues was published in Murder, New York Style, ed. Randy Kandel (L & L Dreamspell).
Erica lives in Watertown, Massachusetts, with her husband David Gallant, a clinical psychologist.
