Max Harris was an exceptional and charismatic presence both in Adelaide and beyond. His significant contribution to Australian literature included founding and co-editing several literary journals, publishing his own poetry, enthusiastically encouraging other peoples' writings, contributing in several publishing ventures, initiating bookselling strategies, warring with the publishing world, prolific journalism, and persistent confrontation with a traditionalist establishment. This chapter seeks to emphasise the significance of his long and energetic involvement in the literary life of the city and the nation.

Maxwell Henley Harris was born at Henley Beach, an Adelaide suburb, in 1921. His childhood was spent in Mount Gambier in the southeast of South Australia and in that small town he gained his greatest formative influences. His imagination was filled with a profusion of local myths and he was later instrumental in directing Melbourne artists Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker towards their own consciousness of an environmental mythology.

Harris won a three-year boarding scholarship to the prestigious boys' private school, St Peter's College in Adelaide, where his first English teacher was John Padman, a critical influence. Padman recognised Harris's literary talent and took him under his wing, introducing him to modern British, US and European literature. Harris read and absorbed the work of writers such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Henry Miller, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas and Virginia Woolf.