Jim Harrison

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Jim Harrison. Courtesy University Press of Mississippi.

James "Jim" Harrison (born December 11, 1937) is an American poet and prose author. He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

Life

Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, to Winfield Sprague Harrison, a county agricultural agent, and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison, both avid readers.

Harrison became blind in an eye after a childhood accident ("My left eye is blind and jogs like / a milky sparrow in its socket"). When he was 21 his father and sister died in an automobile accident. In 1959, he married Linda King, with whom he has 2 daughters.

He was educated at Michigan State University where he earned an B.A. in 1960 and an M.A. (1964) in comparative literature in 1964.. After a short stint as assistant professor of English at State University of New York, Stony Brook (1965–66), he became a full-time writer.

His work has appeared in many leading publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Outside, Playboy, Men's Journal, and The New York Times Book Review. He has published several collections of novellas.

Harrison lives in both Patagonia, Arizona, and Livingston, Montana.

Writing

Poetry

Though famous for fiction, Harrison considers himself first and foremost a poet. In the Introduction to The Shape of the Journey (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), a collection drawn from his first 8 books of poetry, he writes: "This book is the portion of my life that means the most to me....in poetry our motives are utterly similar to those who made cave paintings or petroglyphs, so that studying your own work of the past is to ruminate over artifacts, each one a signal, a remnant of a knot of perceptions that brings back to life who and what you were at that time, the past texture of what has to be termed as your ‘soul life.’" Poetry suffuses everything Harrison writes. "It’s totally uncontrollable," he says. "You don’t have any idea when its going to emerge, and when it’s not going to emerge. I’ve never stopped writing it....You can put off a novel for a while but you can’t not write a poem because that particular muse is not very cooperative." Harrison’s poetry has drawn from predecessors as diverse as the Russian modernist Sergei Yesenin (Letters to Yesenin, 1973), Zen literary traditions (After Ikkyu and Other Poems, 1996), and the American-English traditions of nature-writing (Saving Daylight, 2006) leading back through Wordsworth. His most recent collection of poetry is In Search of Small Gods (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). In it he writes of the natural world: many of his small gods are dogs, fish and birds, and he looks at them with awe and ironic amusement. Harrison discusses his poetry in an extensive interview in Five Points Magazine.

Fiction

Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage by dint of their intelligence and some formal education. They attune themselves to both the natural and the civilized world, surrounded by excesses but determined to live their lives as well as possible.

Harrison became a novelist after he fell off a cliff while bird hunting. During the ensuing recovery, his friend Thomas McGuane suggested he write a novel.

Wolf: A False Memoir (1971) was the result. It is the story of a man who tells his life story while searching for signs of a wolf in the northern Michigan wilderness. This was followed by A Good Day to Die (1973), an ecotage novel and statement about the decline of American ecological systems, and Farmer (1976), a Lolita-like account of a country school teacher and farmer coming to grips with middle age, his mother’s dying, and complications of human sexuality.

Harrison’s 1st novellas were published in 1979 under the title Legends of the Fall. The title novella is an epic story that spans 50 years and tells the tale of a father and 3 sons in the vast spaces of the northern Rocky Mountains around the time of World War I.

Film rights for all 3 stories in the book were sold, and Harrison gradually became a screenwriter. He has a writing credit for the film based on Legends of the Fall. Other films he has scripted or co-written include Cold Feet (1989), with Keith Carradine, Tom Waits and Rip Torn; Revenge (1990), starring Kevin Costner; and Wolf (1994), starring Jack Nicholson. All the while he has continued to publish fiction and poetry. Four more collections of novellas (The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), Julip (1994), The Beast God Forgot to Invent (2000) and The Summer He Didn’t Die (2005)) followed.

After publishing Warlock (1981) and Sundog (1984), Harrison published what is perhaps his most famous novel, Dalva (1988). It is a complex tale, set in rural Nebraska, of a woman’s search for the son she had given up for adoption and for the boy’s father, who also happened to be her half-brother. Throughout the narrative, Dalva invokes the memory of her pioneer great-grandfather John Wesley Northridge, an Andersonville survivor and naturalist whose diaries vividly tell of the destruction of the Plains Indian way of life. Many of these characters once again appear in The Road Home (1998), a complex work using five narrators, including Dalva, her 30-year-old son Nelse, and her grandfather John Wesley Northridge II. Harrison has been described as trying to get at "the soul history of where you live" " in this sequel to Dalva, in this case rural Nebraska in the latter half of the 20th century.

Harrison’s next 2 novels are set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. True North (2004) examines the paralyzing cost to a timber and mining family torn apart by alcoholism and the moral recklessness of a war-damaged father. The novel contains two stories: that of the monstrous father and that of the son’s trying to atone for his father’s evil and, ultimately, reconciling with his family’s history.

Returning to Earth (2007) revisits the setting and characters of True North (2004) thirty years later. The story has 4 narrators: Donald, a mixed-blood Indian, now middle-aged and dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease; Donald’s wife, Cynthia, whom he rescued as a teen from the ruins of her family; Cynthia’s brother David (the central character of True North); and her nephew and Donald’s soul mate K. Ultimately, the extended family helps Donald end his life at the place of his choosing, and then draw on the powers of love and commitment to reconcile loss and heal wounds borne for generations.

Harrison’s 2008 book The English Major is a road novel about a 60-year-old former high school English teacher and farmer from Michigan who, after a divorce and the sale of his farm, heads westward on a mind-clearing road trip. Along the way he falls into an affair with a former student, reconnects with his big-shot son in San Francisco, confers on questions of life and lust with an old doctor friend, and undertakes a project to rename all the states and their state birds.

Recognition

His awards include National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 1968, and 1969), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969–70), the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.

In 2009, University of Nebraska Press published Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1964-2008, an illustrated guide to Harrison’s published works, edited by Gregg Orr and Beef Torrey, which contains more than 1600 citations of writing by and about Harrison.

2 of Harrison's collections of novellas have been turned into films: Revenge (1990) and Legends of the Fall (1994). The film based on Legends of the Fall was directed by Edward Zwick and starred Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, and Aidan Quinn; it won an Academy Award for cinematography.

On August 31, 2009, he was featured in an episode of Anthony Bourdain's television show No Reservations that took place in and around Livingston.

Many of Harrison’s papers are housed at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Publications

Poetry

• Plain Song. New York: Norton, 1965.
• Walking. Cambridge, MA: Pym-Randall, 1967.
• Locations. New York: Norton, 1968.
• Outlyer, and ghazals. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971.
• Letters to Yesenin. Fremont, MI: Sumac Press, 1973; . Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007.
• Returning To Earth. Berkeley, CA: Ithaca House, 1977; New York: Grove Press, 2007.
• Selected and New Poems, 1961-1981 (illustraated by Russell Chatham). New York: Delacorte / Seymour Lawrence, 1982.
• Natural World: A bestiary (with sculpture by Diana Guest). Barrytown, NY: Open Book, 1982.
• The Theory & Practice of Rivers. Seattle, WA: Winn Books, 1985.
• The Theory and Practice of Rivers, and new poems. Livingston, MT: Clark City Press, 1989.
• After Ikkyu, and other poems. Boston: Shambhala, 1996.
• The Shape of the Journey: New and collected poems. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1998.
• Braided Creek: A conversation in poetry (with Ted Kooser). Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
• Livingston Suite (illustrated by Greg Keeler). Boise, ID: Limberlost Press, 2005.
• Saving Daylight. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006.
• In Search of Small Gods. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2009.
• Songs of Unreason. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2011.

Fiction

• Wolf: A false memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971.
• A Good Day to Die: A novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.
• Farmer. New York: Viking, 1976.
• Warlock. New York: Delacorte / Seymour Lawrence, 1981.
• Sundog: The story of an American foreman, Robert Corvus Strang. New York: Dutton / Seymour Lawrence, 1984.
• Dalva. New York: Dutton / Seymour Lawrence, 1988.
• The Road Home. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998.
• True North: A novel. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004; Toronto: Anansi, 2004.
• The English Major. New York: Grove Press, 2008; Toronto: Anansi, 2009.
• The Farmer's Daughter. New York: Grove Press, 2010; Toronto: Anansi, 2010.
• The Great Leader: A faux mystery. New York: Grove Press, 2011.
• The Big Seven: A faux mystery. New York: Grove Press, 2015.

Short fiction

• The Woman Lit By Fireflies (3 novellas: "Brown Dog," "Sunset Limited," and "The Woman Lit by Fireflies"). Boston: Houghton Mifflin / Seymour Lawrence, 1990.
• Legends of the Fall (3 novellas: "Revenge," "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," and "Legends of the Fall"). New York: Delacorte / Seymour Lawrence, 1979.
• Julip (3 novellas: "Julip," "The Seven-Ounce Man," and "The Beige Dolorosa"). Boston: Houghton Mifflin / Seymour Lawrence, 1994.
• The Beast God Forgot to Invent (3 novellas: "The Beast God Forgot to Invent," "Westward Ho," and "I Forgot to Go to Spain"). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
• The Summer He Didn't Die (3 novellas: "The Summer He Didn't Die," "Republican Wives," and "Tracking"). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005.
• The River Swimmer: Novellas. New York: Grove Press, 2013.
• Brown Dog: Novellas. New York: Grove Press, 2013.

Non-fiction

• Just Before Dark: Collected nonfiction. Livingston, MT: Clark City Press, 1991.
• The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Dim Gray Bar Press, 1992.
• also published as The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a roving gourmand. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
• Off to the Side: A memoir. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002.
• Conversations with Jim Harrison (edited by Robert J. DeMott). Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. ISBN 1-57806-455-4
• The Etiquette of Freedom: Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and the practice of the wild (with Gary Snyder). Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010.

Juvenile

• The Boy Who Ran to the Woods (illustrated by Tom Pohrt). New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.

  

  WHIMSY - A POEM BY JIM HARRISON

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Cold Poem"
• from Jim Harrison's Songs of Unreason (5 poems)
• Jim Harrison b. 1937 at the Poetry Foundation

Quotes

• Jim Harrison: What I've learned, Esquire, 2014.

Books

• Jim Harrison at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Jim Harrison in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Audio / video

• Jim Harrison at YouTube

About

• "The Last Lion" Outside Magazine, October 2011
• "It Has to Come to You": Why Jim Harrison writes patiently, The Atlantic
• Jim Fergus (Summer 1988). "Jim Harrison, The Art of Fiction No. 104". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2511/the-art-of-fiction-no-104-jim-harrison. 
• "Pleasures of the Hard-Worn Life: An interview with Jim Harrison", New York Times, 2007. (includes video)]
• review of The Summer He Didn't Die in Narrative Magazine, Fall 2005.

Etc.

• Jim Harrison papers at Grand Valley State University
• Mary Harrison Dumsch papers at Grand Valley State University
• Robert DeMott papers at Grand Valley State University