The World's Largest Man

Winner of the 2016 Thurber Prize
Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father—a hunter, a fighter, a football coach, “a man better suited to living in a remote frontier wilderness of the nineteenth century than contemporary America, with all its progressive ideas and paved roads and lack of armed duels. He was a great man, and he taught me many things: how to fight and work and cheat, and how to pray to Jesus about it, how to kill things with guns and knives and, if necessary, with hammers.”
Harrison, with his love of books and excessive interest in hugging, couldn't have been less like Pop, and when it became clear that he was not able to kill anything very well or otherwise make his father happy, he resolved to become everything his father was not: an actor, a Presbyterian, and a doctor of philosophy. But when it was time to settle down and start a family of his own, Harrison started to view his father in a new light and realized—for better and for worse—just how much he was like the strange man who made him.

HARRISON SCOTT KEY's writing has been featured in The Best American Travel Writing, the New York Times, Outside, Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Southern Living, Reader's Digest, Image, Creative Nonfiction, The Mockingbird, The Green County Independent, The American Conservative, Brevity, Gulf Coast, and Oxford American, where he is also a contributing editor. He teaches at SCAD in Savannah, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and three children. Harper published his first memoir, The World's Largest Man, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.