Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison, maybe America’s best kept literary secret, died last month at the age of 78. With more than 30 published books, Harrison dedicated every inch of himself to his craft. On March 26, 2016, he died in his Arizona studio with an unfinished poem on his desk and pen in his hand.
A native of northern Michigan, Harrison wrote insightful and poignant stories about life in middle America, and was second to none in his ability to transport his readers from the forests and rivers of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to the deserts of Mexico, and everywhere in between.
From a young age Harrison exhibited a kind of geographic claustrophobia that drove him to wander. As a teenager, Harrison took off for months at a time literally hitchhiking across the country from New York City to San Francisco. Life’s journeys are a prominent theme throughout Harrison’s poems, novellas, and novels.
Harrison was a master of character development, and his characters reflect his curiosity and depth of mind as they too roam the forests and cities of the world looking for answers to life’s most basic conundrums. Following their journeys, readers witness the internal conflict of unique and complicated characters struggling to discover the roots of their own pitfalls and desires.
It is entirely possible that you have never read, or even heard of, Jim Harrison. Allow me to introduce you.
By Jim Harrison:
"Harrison has tremendous fun with his own reputation in the title novella, about an aging writer in Montana who spars with his estranged wife, with whom he still shares a home, weathers the slings and arrows of literary success, and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follow soon after. In Eggs, a Montana woman reminisces about staying in London with her grandparents, and collecting eggs at their country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so. And in The Case of the Howling Buddhas, retired Detective Sunderson—a recurring character from Harrison’s New York Times bestseller The Great Leader and The Big Seven—is hired as a private investigator to look into a bizarre cult that achieves satori by howling along with howler monkeys at the zoo.
"True North is the story of a family torn apart and a man engaged in profound reckoning with the damage scarred into the American soil. The scion of a family of wealthy timber barons, David Burkett has grown up with a father who is a malevolent force more than a father, and a mother made vague and numb by alcohol and pills.
"“It used to be Cliff and Vivian and now it isn’t.” With these words, Jim Harrison begins a riotous, moving novel that sends a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, on a road trip across America. Cliff is armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds, the latter of which have been unjustly saddled with white men’s banal monikers up until now. His adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school-teacher days twenty-some years before, to a “snake farm” in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and to the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer who has just bought an apartment over the Presidio in San Francisco.
"Detective Sunderson has fled troubles on the home front and bought himself a hunting cabin in a remote area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. No sooner has he settled in than he realizes his new neighbors are creating even more havoc than the Great Leader did. A family of outlaws, armed to the teeth, the Ameses have local law enforcement too intimidated to take them on. Then Sunderson's cleaning lady, a comely young Ames woman, is murdered, and black sheep brother Lemuel Ames seeks Sunderson's advice on a crime novel he's writing which may not be fiction. Sunderson must struggle with the evil within himself and the far greater, more expansive evil of his neighbor.
"“Few enough are the books I decide to keep beyond a culling or two. Barring fire or flood, Dead Man's Float will be in my library for the rest of my life. If it's the last poetry collection we get from Harrison—and I hope it isn't—it is as fine an example of his efforts as any."—Missoula Independent
"Brown Dog is a bawdy, reckless, down-on-his-luck Michigan Indian. Work is something to do when he needs money, taking time away from the pleasures of fishing. Of course, this means that Brown Dog is never far from catastrophe, searching for an answer to the riddle of family... and perhaps, a chance at redemption.
"Two novellas provide insight into the human condition as a sixty-year-old art history academic embarks on an unexpected journey of discovery and a young farm boy is drawn to the water of Lake Michigan as an escape.
"Slowly dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Donald, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, begins dictating family stories he has never shared with anyone, hoping to preserve history for his children. The dignity of Donald’s death and his legacy encourages his loved ones to find a way to redeem—and let go of—the past, whether through his daughter’s immersion in Chippewa religious ideas or his mourning wife’s attempt to escape the malevolent influence of her own father.
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