Harris never knew his father and was raised by his mother who worked as a seamstress and gardener to support herself. She instilled Harris with a love of literature from a young age. He once said that, “My desire to write—to give expression to my thoughts—grew out of hearing my mother read The Vicar of Wakefield.” In school Harris did well in reading and writing, but was more known among his classmates for his jokes and pranks. Harris ended up leaving school at an early age to work. He was hired as a “printer’s devil,” a young boy whose position was apprentice or lower, for The Countryman newspaper. With a circulation of about 2,000, the paper was one of the largest to serve the Confederacy during the Civil War.