Jim Harris
Age: 63. Founder and current clerk at Prairie Lights books, created the Iowa City icon in a small Linn Street storefront in 1978, moving it four years later into its present downtown Dubuque Street site, where its coffee shop is both larger than the original store, and the 1930s home of a university club that entertained the likes of Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, and Carl Sandburg there. The powerhouse offering 90,000 books built by “Live From Prairie Lights” readings on WSUI Radio and a healthy relationship with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was sold to his first employee Jan Weissmiller and partners in 2008.