Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (With: Ted Kooser)
2003
Livingston Suite
2005
Saving Daylight
2006
In Search of Small Gods
2009
Songs of Unreason
2011
Dead Man’s Float
2016
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
1991
The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand
2001
Off to the Side: A Memoir
2002
The Etiquette of Freedom (With: Gary Snyder)
2010
A Really Big Lunch
2017
The Search for the Genuine
2022
About Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison (1937 to 2016) was an American novelist, poet and essayist, best known for the novella collection “Legends of the Fall” and the novel “Dalva”. He published more than three dozen books, including twelve novels and twenty-four novellas, and much of his fiction is set in thinly populated country: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Sand Hills of Nebraska, Montana and the Arizona border.
Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, on 11 December 1937, the son of a county agricultural agent. A childhood accident left him blind in one eye. He took a BA and an MA in comparative literature at Michigan State University, taught briefly at Stony Brook University, and from 1966 wrote full time. He thought of himself first as a poet, and his first book was the poetry collection “Plain Song” (1965).
He turned to fiction after falling off a cliff while bird hunting, when his friend Thomas McGuane suggested he use his convalescence to write a novel. The result was “Wolf: A False Memoir” (1971). His first commercial success came with “Legends of the Fall” (1979), three novellas written with the help of $30,000 sent by the actor Jack Nicholson. The title story follows a father and three sons in the northern Rocky Mountains around the First World War, and was filmed in 1994 with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins. Another of the three, “Revenge”, became a 1990 film starring Kevin Costner.
“Dalva” (1988) follows a woman in rural Nebraska searching for the son she gave up for adoption, and its characters return in “The Road Home”. “True North” and “Returning to Earth” follow a timber and mining family in the Upper Peninsula. Late in his career Harrison wrote two darkly comic detective novels about Detective Sunderson, “The Great Leader” and “The Big Seven”. The recurring character Brown Dog appears in six novellas, collected in one volume in 2013.
Harrison also wrote screenplays, a memoir, “Off to the Side”, and food essays collected in “The Raw and the Cooked”. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007. He died at his desk in Patagonia, Arizona, on 26 March 2016, weeks after the publication of “The Ancient Minstrel”. Two collections of non-fiction, “A Really Big Lunch” and “The Search for the Genuine”, have appeared since.
