John Mewton Harcourt grew up in Western Australia. After spending some time in Victoria and New South Wales, he returned to WA, joining his father in Kalgoorlie where he worked as an assistant surveyor. He later became a shell opener in Broome, earning two thousand pounds when he opened a shell containing a 13,000 pound pearl.
Going on to work as a journalist, Harcourt set out to write about the realities of the depression in Western Australia. In 1934, the same year he left Perth, he published Upsurge, a novel about life in relief camps which was widely criticised for its strong socialist leanings and subversive political agenda. The novel's Communist characters and sexually explicit content resulted in the novel being banned in Australia and withdrawn from publication.
Prominent West Australian author Katharine Susannah Prichard, herself a vocal socialist, defended Harcourt's book, describing it as Australia's first proletarian novel.
