Harris describes writing as an almost passive process, something that happens to him rather than something he does. His novels start with a scene that plays in his head, then he tries to figure out what came before, and what came after. He talks about his characters as though they exist in the world, leading parallel lives independent from his books.

The work can be painfully slow. Decades have passed between some of his novels.

“Sometimes you really have to shove and grunt and sweat,” Harris says. “Some days you go to your office and you’re the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in.”

He quotes a line from Gustave Flaubert: “Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

Harris grew up in a small community in Mississippi, where his family owned a cotton, soybeans and wheat farm near the Coldwater River. “My companions when I was a small child were mostly turkeys,” he says.

He majored in English at Baylor University and worked as a reporter in Waco, Tex. Magazine assignments took him to northern Mexico, where he met a prison doctor who later became an inspiration for Hannibal Lecter.

In 1968, he got a job at The Associated Press in New York, covering robberies, murders and riots. While there, he and two other reporters outlined the plot for “Black Sunday,” a novel about a terrorist scheme to attack the Super Bowl. (They split the advance, and Harris wrote the story.)

Harris wrote his second novel, “Red Dragon,” which introduced Hannibal, when he was caring for his ailing father in Mississippi. Stephen King compared the book with “The Godfather” and later called Hannibal “the great fictional monster of our time.” The director, Michael Mann, adapted the story into a feature film.