On concluding her world journey, Harrison settled in Waikiki. Her Atlantic Monthly income was given over to a spacious custom-designed tent, which she erected in the front yard of a bungalow owned by a Japanese family, the Tadas. Her book was published soon afterward. Advertised as the “penetrating diary of an extraordinary colored woman” and directed at an assumed white readership, it sold so well as to go through nine printings in ten months. Harrison casually referred to it as a best seller, noting the many fan letters she received and the many autographs she signed. Yet despite enjoying the celebrity, she was ambivalent about authorship, concerned it might disrupt a “life plan” she once described as “all set up until I die.”
My Great, Wide, Beautiful World was reviewed by many prominent newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Saturday Review of Literature, and Time magazine. The prevailing tone was a blend of condescension and respect, as in Katherine Woods’ assessment in the New York Times, that “there is nothing on our shelves, certainly, that is quite like this spontaneous, shrewd, and unselfconscious story of the Odyssey of an American Negress.” With far less literary acuity and respect, a syndicated advice columnist described Harrison as “the ignorant Negro woman…who worked her way around the world by just being natural. She was neither overawed by the great and rich nor scornful of the poor and lowly.” Such reviews portray Harrison as naive and unschooled, and as a result able to enter into exotic and unknown locales more deeply than the familiar middle-class protagonists of more conventional travel narratives.
Harrison’s book was embraced by readers nationwide, including Black women and men who kept it perennially checked out of local libraries and white women in provincial cities such as Tampa, St. Cloud, and Bakersfield who selected it for their book clubs, often emphasizing its humor and entertainment value. Carl Van Vechten urged Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein to read My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, and it inspired Era Bell Thompson, author of American Daughter and future longtime editor of Ebony magazine, to tour the American West. Others, however, including Harlem Renaissance writer and educator Alain Locke, were concerned that Harrison’s insouciant narrative persona might confirm racist stereotypes. In his roundup “Books by Negro Authors in 1936,” the white civil rights leader Arthur Spingarn wrote, “A radiant and valiant personality shines through the book, but though highly touted, it is likely to thrill only those people who know ‘colored people are like that.’ ” We have no record of Harrison’s response to these comments.
