Ewen Harris is the pen name of John Harris.  The assumed name, pronounced You-wen, is a rarer version of the Gaelic Owen.   Harris picked it not to hide his identity, but only to make his handle less plain-and somewhat to signify his love of Ireland.  In his younger days, he logged well over 1000 miles walking the byways of rural Ireland, and he reads Gaelic and Welsh fluently (as well as seven other languages, including Latin and ancient Greek).  His enthusiasm for the very different pasts of the classical and the Celtic world found scholarly expression last year in Adaptations of Roman Epic in Medieval Ireland (Edwin Mellen Press), a book which had roots going back to his doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984.

    In fact, Ewen is a native Texan, and a certain frontier independence has always made him an uneasy denizen of academia. His distaste for pomp and circumstance is reflected in his most recent scholarly study, Chaos, Cosmos, and Saint-Exupéry's Pilot-Hero (University of Scranton Press).  He describes this work as a labor of love whose origins reach back even farther than the other book's; and to the charge that Saint-Exupéry was a male supremacist and a fascist, he counters that the writer-aviator pursued the truth passionately through the haze of cultural prejudice and died resisting Nazism.

    Yet political correctness was eventually to poison Ewen's academic career.  Though an award-winning teacher of writing, language, and literature whose time in the classroom spanned almost two decades, he recently resigned his last job to protest higher education's vast betrayal of its mission.  He immediately founded Arcturus Press in order to explore whether the fight against the electronic media's control of our minds might be waged better through the printed word.   So far, the press's accomplishments have been quite humble (through Ewen has discovered a gift for illustrating: he has produced two beautiful sets of note cards and plans to accompany his translation of Luigi Capuana's Scurpiddu with his own sketches). Seven Demons Worse is far and away the brightest star at Arcturus presently.

    Harris insists that only the novel's most tedious details are autobiographical.  The rest he has drawn from anecdotal accounts and first-hand experience of life in the academy.  Though the book's condemnation of recreational sex flies full in the face of the "educated" lifestyle, he has yoked the fortunes of his fledgling business to this message because, he says, someone desperately needs to deliver it.

    Ewen is married and has one son.  He attributes the success of his family life to the ideal of the Christian gentleman which he always kept before him, and sees in the agenda of campus feminism a prescription for universal misery.   He has hopes that his own exposure to the campus may not quite be at an end, however.   He plans to use the press to help him create Voluntas College, a "literacy school" where students will have writing, literature, foreign language, and philosophy in strong doses.

Seven Demons Worse by Ewen Harris, 178 pages, $11.95 published by Arcturus Press, 117 East Third Street, Tyler, TX 75701. Tel: 903-566-4985, Fax: 903-566-6666  E-mail author: alasdair@lakecountry.net