Anecdotes

Jim Harrison wrote the book "Legends of the Fall" (which contains the title novella, "Revenge," and one other short novel) over the course of a long weekend, during which he was snowed in his writer's shack and unable to leave.

Harrison was born December 11, 1937, in Grayling, Michigan. He married Linda King in 1959 and had two daughters. The grandson of farmers and son of an agricultural extension agent, Harrison grew up in small Michigan towns where he developed a love of books and a primal bond with the outdoors. He would associate his childhood with simple pleasures and ongoing loss, a general longing for simpler times and the physical handicap of his blind left eye, injured at age 7 when a neighborhood girl jammed a bottle in his face. In the 1950s and 60s he drifted between studies at Michigan State University and the Beat scene in Boston, where he met Jack Kerouac, and New York City, where he taught briefly before returning to rural Michigan. In 1965, Harrison debuted as a poet with "Plain Song." Life as an outdoors-man inadvertently made him a novelist. In the late 1960s he slipped off a bank along the Manistee River in Michigan, injured his back, lapsed into a semi-coma and for about two years was forced to wear a corset. His close friend Tom McGuane suggested he try a full-length work of fiction since Harrison "could no longer do anything to avoid it." Harrison's first novel, "Wolf: A Fake Memoir," came out in 1971 and was followed two years later by a work of fiction about the ecology, "A Good Day to Die." But he was devastated by the commercial failure of his novel "Farmer" and was so broke, he recalled, that he couldn't pay his taxes, and couldn't fill out a scholarship form for his daughter because he was required to include records from the IRS. His turnaround involved a true Hollywood twist. Harrison was visiting his in-laws' home when he came upon the journals of his wife's great-grandfather William Ludlow and was inspired to write a story. What became "Legends of the Fall" was made possible by a $15,000 loan from Jack Nicholson. "And now the one-eyed goofy, the black-sheep poet ... has inadvertently struck it rich," Harrison later wrote of his mid-life success. "After the first full year of this experience I was sitting on the porch of our recently remodeled farmhouse, triple the estimated time and expense and a thoroughly enervating process, reading the Detroit Free Press and noting that I had made more money in the last year than the president of General Motors, Harlow Curtis. I idly hoped Harlow Curtis was happy in his work".

He was known as a gourmet cook and something of a gourmand. His food writing was collected in "The Raw and the Cooked".

He wrote about 40 books including prose, poetry, essays and memoir, and had his work translated into 27 languages.

Harrison's feature film screenplay credits also included "Revenge," starring Kevin Costner, and the Jack Nicholson feature film "Wolf." But Harrison would liken the unpredictable and nerve-racking script-writing process to being trapped in a "shuddering elevator" and reminded himself of his marginal status by inscribing a put-down by a Hollywood executive, "You're just a writer," on a piece of paper, taping the paper quote above his writing desk.

Jim Harrison, the fiction writer, poet, outdoors-man and reveler who wrote with gruff affection for the country's landscape and rural life and enjoyed mainstream success in middle age with his historical saga "Legends of the Fall" died Saturday, March 26, 2016, at his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Harrison's wife of more than 50years, Linda King Harrison, died in the fall of 2015. The versatile and prolific author completed more than 30 books, most recently the novella collection "The Ancient Minstrel," and was admired worldwide. Sometimes likened to Ernest Hemingway for the range of his interests, Jim Harrison was a hunter and fisherman who savored his time in a cabin near his Michigan hometown and a Hollywood scriptwriter who was close friends with Jack Nicholson and came to know Sean Connery, Orson Welles and Warren Beatty, among others. Grove Atlantic Publisher and Chief Executive Morgan Entrekin said, "his voice came from the American heartland and his deep and abiding love of the American landscape runs through his extraordinary body of work".

Jim Harrison could have been a superb character actor, bearded, burly man with a disfigured left eye and a smoker's rasp who confided that when out in public with Jack Nicholson he was sometimes mistaken for the actor's bodyguard. Erudite enough to write reviews for the New York Times and to quote Wallace Stevens from memory, Harrison also had a strong affinity for physical labor and a history of writing stories about men. "My characters aren't from the urban dream-coasts," he told the Paris Review in 1986. "A man is not a foreman on a dam project because he wants to be macho. That's his job, a job he's evolved into. How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I've been doing it since I was four".

Published in 1979, "Legends of the Fall" was a collection of three novellas that featured the title story about Montana rancher Col. William Ludlow and his three sons of sharply contrasting personalities and values, the narrative extending from before World War I to the mid-20th century, from San Francisco to Singapore. "Late in October 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana to Calgary, Alberta to enlist in the Great War," reads Harrison's celebrated opening sentence, which author Vance Bourjaily would praise for establishing "both the voice and manner of the epic storyteller, who deals in great vistas and vast distances." The book was a bestseller, and Harrison worked on a film script for an Oscar-nominated 1994 feature film of the same name starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn.