When 70-year-old Harriet Doerr finished reading her work before the other students in Stanford’s Stegner program in creative writing, the room was silent. She assumed they all thought it was horrible. They hurried to tell her just the opposite: it was wonderful.
Doerr, an award-winning writer who discovered her talent late in life, died November 24 in her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., at 92.
She grew up in a large family that encouraged independent thought and spirited argument. Transferring to Stanford after a year at Smith College, she dropped out in 1930, after her junior year, to marry Albert Doerr, ’30, whom she knew from back home. For 25 years, they lived in Pasadena, where she raised their daughter and son and volunteered in community-service projects. In the late 1950s, the couple moved to a village in the Mexican state of Aguascalientes to restore an old copper mine owned by Albert’s family. They stayed until Albert died in 1972.
Not long afterward, her son, Michael, ’53, suggested she return to college. She accepted the challenge, finishing her BA in history in 1977—a half-century after she first enrolled at Stanford. With the encouragement of writing professors, she continued in the creative writing program, becoming a Stegner fellow in 1980. Though old enough to be a grandmother to most of the students, Doerr enjoyed getting together with them for burgers and beer. Her respect for eccentricity and independent thinking led her to prefer student life in the 1970s to her college experience in the 1920s, says her daughter, Martha Doerr Toppin, of Oakland.
After Stanford, Doerr returned to her Pasadena home. She published her first book, Stones for Ibarra, at age 74. The novel, based partly on her life in Mexico, won the 1984 American Book Award for First Fiction Work and was translated into 10 languages. Consider This, Señora appeared a decade later; The Tiger in the Grass, an essay collection, came out in 1995, the same year her son died.
Critics described Doerr’s writing as “spare and graceful,” “lapidary” and “lovely and as pure as clear water, and as rare.” Her honors included the Transatlantic Review-Henfield Foundation Award, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style, and finalist honors in the PEN competition for fiction.
Doerr worked tirelessly and meticulously, typically writing about one sentence per hour. “She was a perfectionist,” Toppin says. “Each word was chosen carefully. Mother had to hear the word rise in her brain and flow down all the length of her arm, through her hand, through the pencil, onto the page.”
Her methodical approach to writing contrasted with her liveliness and spontaneity at speaking engagements, which she loved. “Thirty seconds after beginning, she had the audience in the palm of her hand,” Toppin recalls. “She enjoyed surprising them a bit, and her charm was enormous.”
