Until recently, Sue Harrison was known mostly for making the best bread-and-butter pickles in Pickford, Mich. (pop. 600). Now she is famous for more than that. Doubleday has just gone back for a fifth printing (a total of 100,000 copies) of Mother Earth Father Sky, Harrison's 313-page novel about the Aleutian peoples in prehistoric times. The publisher gave her a staggering half-million-dollar advance for the book, the first of a projected trilogy, and is spending another $100,000 on publicity. In a world without Jean Auel, Mother Earth Father Skywould be an unlikely candidate for such lavish attention. But after the surprise success of Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear series, prehistory is commanding near-historic prices.
Sue Harrison, 39, would also seem an unlikely candidate for celebrity. Born and raised on Michigan's sparsely populated Upper Peninsula, she is America's picture of the perfect mom, a woman who leads with a smile, wears her hair short and neat, and goes to the steepled Methodist church on Sundays. So far her world has not extended much beyond her computer-specialist husband, two teenage children, and a house her husband built so far back in the woods that lynx scream in the yard at night. There are still no malls in the area and so few bookstores that her children are peddling her novel out of their home.
As a child, Harrison idolized Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books about pioneer life. When she was 19, she married Neil Harrison, who had first caught her eye when he chased her to the playground monkey bars in first grade. Together, they struggled to put themselves through a nearby college and then bought a sporting goods store, which he tended while she kept the books. Their first daughter died of meningitis. Two healthy children later, their business failed after the local Air Force base closed.
