"I've sometimes been asked why he wasn't as famous as Burroughs and Ginsberg, and the other celebrated Beat writers, and I've always said he needed a better press agent or a better strategy. Until he was taken up by San Francisco's radical gay activists, he was strictly a literary man—which was not enough to vault him to fame. His poems, fine as they were, didn't make headlines." — from the Prologue by JH
Clemson University Press, 2022
"The most important thing to understand about him is that Homophobia really is the last acceptable prejudice . . . To borrow from the screenplay of Gentleman's Agreement, the 1947 film about systemic anti-Semitism: "A 'faggot' is the gay gentleman who has just left the room." Fear of the queer, and a casual disregard of "open Queers" like Harold were always the real obstacle to his finding the acclaim he sought. If only he could have seen that it would all come to pass." — from the Afterword by James Grauerholz
In November I looked for all my published works in City Lights Bookstore and found only my early translations of Belli, I did not exist on the bookshelves altho’ a thesis to prove that I did exist was written by some kid in Arkansas, 300 pages that nobody ever read called Orpheus Unacclaimed: Harold Norse, So What? — from “In November” by Harold Norse, Hotel Nirvana (1974)
