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In July 2008, E. Lynn Harris published Just Too Good to Be True, a book about a college football star whose single mother insisted he remain celibate.
"I didn't think I could write in the voice of a 21-year-old straight boy," Harris told USA TODAY at the time. "I'm very curious to see how my fans will take to this." He needn't have worried: The novel became a USA TODAY best seller.
The popular Harris, who died Thursday in Los Angeles at age 54 of undetermined causes, had 10 USA TODAY best sellers, including this year's Basketball Jones.
He carved out a niche writing commercial fiction about the lives and loves of black Americans, particularly male athletes who were wrestling with their sexuality, often on the "down low." The openly gay Harris wrote about his own struggles in the memoir What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.
He dealt with the then-taboo topic of bisexual and gay black men in his 1994 debut, Invisible Life. Harris worked for a decade as an IBM executive before he started writing,and built an audience selling Invisible Life from his car as he visited beauty parlors around Atlanta.
