Jim Harrison

American poet, novelist, and essayist who was particularly known for his novellas.

• Born: December 11, 1937
• Birthplace: Grayling, Michigan
• Died: March 26, 2016
• Place of death: Patagonia, Arizona

Biography

Though his writing has been generally well received since he published Plain Song, Jim Thomas Harrison remained on the fringes of American letters by choosing to avoid the literary circles of New York City and rejecting academia in order to focus specifically on his craft. The son of Winfield and Olivia (Wahlgren) and the brother of four siblings, he was born in northern Michigan, a place full of the lakes, rivers, swamps, and woods that would define the geography of his poetry and prose. When he was seven, he was blinded in one eye by a piece of glass. From Grayling, his family moved to Reed City, Michigan, near the Manistee National Forest, where he spent most of his childhood.

During his youth, Harrison developed a love for hunting and fishing, which pervaded his life. Born into a farming culture, his father was a state agricultural agent who specialized in soil conservation. It is said that his father had categorical knowledge of Michigan’s flora, fauna, farmland, and watersheds, which may have taught Harrison to understand at an early age humans’ connection to nature. His parents encouraged him to read, and he began writing poetry on a typewriter that his father gave him. From Reed City, his family moved to Haslett, Michigan, near Lansing. He began writing seriously at the age of sixteen, when he also started to travel, mainly by hitchhiking, to New York City, Boston, Chicago, the western states, and San Francisco, a cycle that he would continue well into his twenties.

After high school, he attended Michigan State University (MSU). Although he did not always feel comfortable in the formal environment of the classroom, he became a lifelong student of world literature, among many other subjects, during his college years. He graduated in 1960 with a bachelor of arts degree, and after a few years of wandering physically and intellectually, he received his master’s degree in comparative literature in 1965. His master’s thesis, titled “A Natural History of Some Poems,” revolves around the discussion of the origins of his own poetry from the collection Plain Song. In this he borrows from Sigmund Freud, stating that the act of writing a poem is a primary process, meaning that it as natural as any human act. Therefore, poetry is not an art that should have been elevated from the concerns of common people. Harrison also explains the purpose of a poet’s use of persona, which is to transform a personal experience in order to explore the possibilities of its aesthetic and psychological significance. Persona becomes a key factor in his poetry and his career as a novelist, as even the most learned readers have trouble separating him from his characters.

In 1959 he married Linda King, with whom he raised two daughters. After Harrison earned his master’s degree, his mentor at MSU, Professor Herbert Weisinger, took him to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. There he taught for almost two years, starting in 1965. However, he found teaching unfulfilling and disruptive to his writing, and in 1967, he and Linda moved back to Michigan, where they rented a farmhouse in the Leelanau Peninsula in northern Michigan. They would live there the rest of the century. In 1968 Harrison began a literary journal called the Sumac Reader with poet and lifelong friend Dan Gerber. Based in Fremont, Michigan, the Sumac Reader published works by an impressive array of established poets, along with writers who would go on to have outstanding and prolific careers: Diane Wakoski, Charles Simic, Hayden Carruth, Barbara Drake, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Carl Rakosi, Denise Levertov, and many more.

In addition to many formative experiences in the 1960s, Harrison’s writing career officially began in 1965. With the encouragement of Denise Levertov, he published his first book, Plain Song. The first poem in this collection is titled “Sketch for a Job Application Blank,” which he wrote in New York City in the early 1960s during a search for employment. He began this poem as a letter to Pablo Neruda, one of his early influences along with Federico García Lorca, Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, T. S. Eliot, Boris Pasternak, and many others. However, the piece took a different route, and the result was that Harrison believed that he had finally written a poem worthy of the craft. Metaphorically, he had escaped the influences of his predecessors to find his own voice. Plain Song and Locations both focus on traditional aesthetics and formal meter. Filled with wilderness locales and imagery, these books often take on a fairy-tale quality, in which beauty and innocence are balanced with impending danger, violence, and death. The death is sometimes a transformed discussion of the loss of Harrison’s sister and father, who were killed by a drunk driver in 1962. Just as often he shows it through humans’ destruction of nature, which inevitably results in humans’ destruction of humans. He also uses intertextuality, references to Christianity, and a pastiche of classical mythology.

In 1968 Harrison received the National Endowment for the Arts Award, and in 1969 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1968 he met a former acquaintance from MSU, Thomas McGuane, author of The Sporting Club (1969), Nobody’s Angel (1982), and Nothing but Blue Skies (1992). McGuane, who became one of his best friends, helped to move Harrison’s career in a more progressive direction, encouraging him to try fiction. This encouragement, along with an extended hospital stay for an injury sustained during a hunting accident, resulted in Harrison’s first novel, Wolf. Based on the literal and intellectual wandering Harrison did in the 1950s and 1960s, Wolf received mixed reviews. Many labeled the novel as experimental and sensed too much autobiography. However, Swanson, the main character, represents a culture of lost intellectuals in the Vietnam War era.

In the same year that Wolf was published, Harrison published his third book of poems, Outlyer and Ghazals. The work provides social commentary in several visually driven short poems that expose a range of human desires. Letters to Yesenin, his fourth book of poems, consists of thirty-one poems for Sergei Esenin, a young Russian poet who killed himself in St. Petersburg in 1925. In the same year he published Letters to Yesenin, Harrison also published his second novel, A Good Day to Die, which pursues the idea of humans’ destruction of nature more explicitly than the poems published earlier and continues his discussion on the lack of direction in the United States during the Vietnam War. He followed this with the novel Farmer, a regional tale of adultery that draws from Christian mythology and cultural archetypes. Despite Harrison’s having published three novels and five books of poetry, his family lived below the poverty level throughout the 1970’s. Because his fiction and poetry made little money, he earned a meager living by writing book reviews for The New York Times and columns in Sports Illustrated and Esquire, along with taking odd jobs. His fifth book of poetry, Returning to Earth, strays from his insistence on metrical form and pursues the idea of self-doubt. It is as if, to borrow his own idea, he is killing poetry so that it may rejuvenate.

Harrison’s career was rejuvenated by the critical and financial success of his collection of 3 connected novellas, Legends of the Fall (1978). In the novella Legends of the Fall, Harrison seemed to be defining the American experience through his characters’ universal experiences. Harrison produced some of his best fiction and poetry in the decade and a half that followed. Dalva (1988) stepped out of Harrison’s normal arenas and explored the struggles of a woman to find the child she gave up. In 1990 and 1991, he published another two novellas in three-novella format: The Woman Lit by Fireflies and Julip, a sequel to Dalva. His celebrated book of poetry, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, and New Poems (1989), was also published during this time.

In the 1980s and early 90s, Harrison also made a successful career of writing screenplays. He and McGuane wrote the screenplay for Cold Feet (1989). He also cowrote the script for Wolf (1994), which starred his long-time friend Jack Nicholson. Though he did not write the script, Legends of the Fall was adapted into a 1994 film starring Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, and Aidan Quinn. Harrison eventually tired of Hollywood and left the business. Despite his prior success, his best-selling work was yet to come. In 2004, he published True North, about Michigan native David Burkett and his lifelong struggle to overcome, in seemingly Oedipal fashion, the influence of his father and his family history.

In total, Jim Harrison was an prolific writer. He produced twenty-one works of fiction, six nonfiction titles, sixteen volumes of poetry, a children’s book, and three screen plays. Harrison’s wife, Linda, passed away in 2015. Jim Harrison died on March 26, 2016, of a heart attack at the age of seventy-eight.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Wolf: A False Memoir, 1971

A Good Day to Die, 1973

Farmer, 1976

Legends of the Fall, 1979 (includes 3 novellas: Revenge, The Man Who Gave Up His Name, and Legends of the Fall)

Warlock, 1981

Sundog: The Story of American Foreman, 1984

Dalva, 1988

The Woman Lit by Fireflies, 1990 (includes 3 novellas: Brown Dog, Sunset Limited, and The Woman Lit by Fireflies)

Julip, 1994 (includes 3 novellas: Julip, The Seven Ounce Man, and The Beige Dolorosa)

The Road Home, 1998

The Beast God Forgot to Invent, 2000 (includes 3 novellas: The Beast God Forgot to Invent, Westward Ho, and Forgot to Go to Spain)

True North, 2004

The Summer He Didn’t Die, 2005 (includes 3 novellas: The Summer He Didn’t Die, Republican Wives, and Tracking)

Returning to Earth, 2007

The English Major, 2008

The Farmer’s Daughter, 2010 (includes 3 novellas: The Farmer’s Daughter, Brown Dog Redux, and The Games of Night)

The Great Leader, 2011

Brown Dog, 2013 (includes 6 novellas: Brown Dog, The Seven-Ounce Man, The Summer He Didn’t Die, Brown Dog Redux, and the previously unpublished He Dog)

The River Swimmer, 2013 (includes 2 novellas: The Land of Unlikeness and The River Swimmer)

The Big Seven, 2015

The Ancient Minstrel, 2017 (includes 3 novellas: Eggs, The Case of the Howling Buddhas, and The Ancient Minstrel)

Poetry:

Plain Song, 1965

Locations, 1968

Outlyer and Ghazals, 1971

Letters to Yesenin, 1973

Returning to Earth, 1977

Selected and New Poems, 1961–1981, 1982

Natural World, 1982

The Theory and Practice of Rivers: Poems, 1985

The Theory and Practice of Rivers, and New Poems, 1989

After Ikkyu, and Other Poems, 1996

The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, 1998

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, 2003

Saving Daylight, 2006

In Search of Small Gods, 2009

Songs of Unreason, 2011

Dead Man’s Float, 2016

Nonfiction:

Confusion Reigns: A Quick-and-Easy Guide to the Most Easily Mixed-Up Words, 1987 (Kimble Mead, illustrator)

Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction, 1991

The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand, 2001

Conversations with Jim Harrison, 2002 (Robert DeMott, editor)

Off to the Side: A Memoir, 2002

A Really Big Lunch, 2017

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

The Boy Who Ran to the Woods, 2000 (Tom Pohrt, illustrator)

Screenplays:

Cold Feet, 1989 (with Thomas McGuane)

Revenge, 1990 (adaptation of his novella; with Jeffrey Allen Fiskin and Robert Garland)

Wolf, 1994 (with Wesley Strick)

Bibliography

Carlson, Michael. “Jim Harrison Obituary: Author of Legends of the Fall.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 30 Mar. 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2016. Obituary of the author discusses his stature as a “writer on outdoor life,” his influences, passion for food, and how he was often compared to Ernest Hemingway..

Davis, Todd. “A Spiritual Topography: Northern Michigan in the Poetry of Jim Harrison.” Midwest Quarterly 42, no. 1 (Autumn, 2000): 94-104. Print. Examines the spiritual topography in the poetry of Jim Harrison, that is, how his quest for life’s meaning is influenced by the natural world, particularly the landscape of Northern Michigan, and how that landscape figures in the poems.

Fox, Margalit. “Jim Harrison, Poet, Novelist, and Essayist, Is Dead at 78.” New York Times. New York Times, 27 Mar. 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2016. Obituary includes a discussion of Harrison’s impact as a writer.

Harrison, Jim. “The Art of Fiction, CIV: Jim Harrison.” Interview by Jim Fergus. The Paris Review 107 (1988): 53-97. Print. In this interview, Fergus asks the right questions about life, literature, and art. Harrison’s responses are personal and enlightening, giving the reader a variety of interesting insights into the craft of fiction and poetry.

Harrison, Jim. Conversations with Jim Harrison. Edited by Robert DeMott. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002. Print. This collection of interviews with Harrison includes bibliographic references and an index.

Harrison, Jim. Interview by Wendy Smith. Publishers Weekly 237 (August 3, 1990): 59–60. Print. A general discussion of some of the basic characteristics of Harrison’s writing, followed by comments by Harrison on his work; Harrison notes that, although he still considers fiction and poetry his major work, he is intrigued by the screenplay format.

Harrison, Jim. “Jim Harrison.” In Conversations with American Novelists, edited by Kay Bonetti, Greg Michaelson, Speer Morgan, Jo Sapp, and Sam Stowers. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997. Print. Harrison discusses how the skills he developed writing poetry were transferred to his fiction; talks about the sometimes negative influence of university writing programs, his reputation as a macho writer, his interest in the novella form, and his work as a screenwriter.

Lorenz, Paul H. “Rethinking Machismo: Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall.” Publication of the Arkansas Philological Association 15 (1989): 41–52. Print. A concise explanation showing what function macho characters serve in Legends of the Fall and Revenge. Lorenz explains his interpretation of the cowboy macho mentality, detailing the actions of various characters to prove Harrison’s intent, which is to represent the failure of this mentality in civilization. The “mythic cowboy hero” is but a myth and cannot be revived, according to Lorenz’s interpretation, and any attempt by these characters to “blaze a solitary path through a senseless world [only] leads to unhappiness, banishment, and death.” Bibliography.

Mesic, Penelope. “Riders on the Storm.” Chicago Magazine (January, 1995): 31–32. Print. Interview with Harrison about his views on Legends of the Fall facing Hollywood attention as a subject for a feature film. Interesting comments by Harrison on his challenges to keep the film and novella cohesive and his newly found personal attraction to the story.

Morgan, Thais E. Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory, and the Question of Genders. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Print. A collection of essays that explores questions about gender and writing from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including psychoanalysis, semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, postmodernism, and discourse analysis. A good insight to Harrison’s style.

Reed, Julia. “After Seven Acclaimed Novels, Jim Harrison Is Finding It Harder to Elude Fame.” Vogue 179 (September, 1989): 502. Print. A brief biographical sketch, commenting on Harrison’s shunning of publishing hype and promotion. Discusses Harrison’s screenplays; argues that the strength of his writing lies in his hypnotic use of language, his romantic and compelling characters, and his ability to reveal the human need to be close to nature.

Reilly, Edward C. Jim Harrison. New York: Twayne, 1996. Print. In this book of Harrison criticism, Reilly discusses the ways in which Harrison uses fiction as a medium for social commentary, among other topics.

Roberson, William H. “‘A Good Day to Live’; The Prose Works of Jim Harrison.” Great Lakes Review: A Journal of Midwest Culture 8–9 (1983): 29–37. Print. Roberson’s review-like treatment of selected prose is an overview of basic themes in Harrison’s fiction. He disputes the notion that Harrison is writing “macho fiction” by providing a clear analysis to the contrary. Includes notes.

Smith, Patrick A. The True Bones of My Life. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2002. Print. With this collection of essays, Smith explores Harrison’s fiction in terms of such ideas as the American myth, the American Dream, postmodernism, and the importance of place. Includes several photographs, an index, a critical bibliography, and a bibliography of Harrison’s work that lists many of his published essays.

Taylor, Henry. “Next to Last Things.” Poetry 176, no 2 (May, 2000): 96–106. Print. As part of an omnibus review, Taylor applies his considerable critical skills to an appreciation of Harrison’s The Shape of the Journey.