Donald Heiney

Who was Donald Heiney?

Donald Heiney was a sailor and academic as well as a prolific and inventive writer using the pseudonym of MacDonald Harris for fiction.

Heiney was born in South Pasadena, California, and grew up in South Pasadena and San Gabriel. He served in the Merchant Marine and the Navy during World War II and afterward earned a B.A. from University of Redlands. He joined the faculty of University of California, Irvine in 1965 and later co-founded UCI's writing program. One of his students was Michael Chabon, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Some of his distinguished colleagues were novelist Oakley Hall, Victorian scholar and Poet Robert Peters, and Literary Critic Hillis Miller.

Publishers Weekly has described his work as "known for...metaphysics, hints of magic and the absurd, and a profound preoccupation with the duality of human nature," and the Chicago Tribune Book World called him "a gifted craftsman, a meticulous writer whose powers as a story teller are as compelling as the sexual tensions he imagines."

His novel The Balloonist, published in 1976 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, tells the story of a polar expedition, similar to and possibly inspired by the real journey made by S. A. Andrée. The Balloonist was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977. It was reissued in 2011 by the UK publisher Galileo and in 2012 in the USA by The Overlook Press, with a foreword by Philip Pullman and positive reviews from The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.