Harrison Post was born Albert Weis Harrison likely in New York in about 1897, and had a somewhat itinerant childhood, both before and after his parents separated when he was a small child. He spent his teenage years largely in the Sacramento, California area with his father. By 1919, he was going by the name Harrison Post and was working at Marsh & Company in San Francisco, where he met William Andrews Clark, Jr. who had come into the store as a customer. Post soon moved to Los Angeles to be with Clark, and later worked at the library as an assistant librarian, in addition to decorating the interiors of the library and Clark residence. By the 1930s, Clark and Post’s romance had cooled but they remained close friends, and at Clark’s death, Post inherited a substantial amount of money. Post was incapacitated by a long illness at the time of Clark’s death and nearly all of his money and possessions were liquidated by his sister Gladys, who took conservatorship over him. In 1938, Post traveled to Norway with a former nurse and was later interned in a POW camp during World War II. At the end of the war, he returned to the US and died in San Francisco in 1946.