Other literary forms
Although Jim Harrison began his career as a poet, it was the publication of his fourth fiction title, Legends of the Fall (1979), that brought him national recognition. The book, which consisted of three novellas, two of which had previously appeared in Esquire, proved so successful that Dell Publishing Company reissued his previously published novels in paperback editions. The book became the basis of two films, Revenge (1990) and Legends of the Fall (1994). Harrison has published numerous other volumes of fiction, some of which also are three-novella collections. His Farmer (1976) became the basis for the film Carried Away (1996), and Dalva (1988) became a 1996 television movie. Harrison also wrote screenplays, including Cold Feet (1988, with Thomas McGuane) and Wolf (1994). The Boy Who Ran to the Woods (2000) is his first book for children. Harrison’s novels and novellas, like his poetry, are often marked by a lyrical imagination, intelligence, and passion for living.
Harrison has also published numerous essays dealing with sports, cooking, wine, fishing, farming, and hunting; these articles complement the tone and thrust of his other writing and offer further evidence of his commitment to the natural environment and the code of ethics necessary for its maintenance. Just Before Dark (1991) is a collection of his nonfiction prose pieces. In 2002, he published Off to the Side: A Memoir.
Achievements
Jim Harrison has long been recognized as a talented and important voice in American letters. He has received National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 1968, 1969), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969-1970), and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association (2000). He was also elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.
Harrison has combined a unique blend of elements, uniting the American vernacular with a distinctly Eastern metaphysics and widely reaching references to European culture. He consistently fuses primitive and naturalistic images with the arcane and ponderous and draws on both gothic and surreal conventions. By refusing to limit himself to a single genre and by attending to “audible things, things moving at noon in full raw light,” Harrison has been able to appeal to a diversified audience and to promulgate an integrated vision that embodies the subtler nuances of the physical and natural world. Relying on what T. S. Eliot called “the auditory imagination,” he enables the reader to hear and feel simultaneously the meaning and motion of objects and experiences and to take part in the poet’s personal journey toward self-discovery.
Other Literary Forms
Although best known for his prose—novels and novellas—Jim Harrison is an accomplished poet (After Ikkyu and Other Poems, 1996; The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, 1998), essayist, and screenwriter. As a man of letters, Harrison made his poetic debut with the publication of Plain Song (1965). The Theory and Practice of Rivers (1985) represents a continuing pursuit of the poetic muse. Essays concerning food, travel, sports, and critical literary insights appear in Just Before Dark (1991). The screenplays Revenge (1989), based on the novella in Legends of the Fall, and Wolf (1994), which he wrote with Wesley Strick and which is based on the novel of the same name, are his most noted works in that genre.
Achievements
The accumulation of Jim Harrison’s writing ensures him a place among important writers of the late twentieth century. The multifarious concerns addressed in his books of fiction, poetry, and numerous nonfiction articles are gleaned from his intense capacity for observation, memory, and experience.
Harrison received a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 1968 and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1969; he was also awarded twice by the National Literary Anthology.
Other literary forms
To appreciate fully the lyrical voice that dominates Jim Harrison’s best novels, it...
(This entire section contains 273 words.)
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is helpful to bear in mind that he began his career as a poet. His first two volumes of poetry,Plain Song (1965), written under the name James Harrison, and Locations (1968), received very little attention, and the reviews were mixed. With the publication of Outlyer and Ghazals (1971), critics began to give Harrison his due, but his next two volumes, Letters to Yesenin (1973) and Returning to Earth (1977), both issued by small publishing houses, were again overlooked, even after they were reissued in a single volume in 1979. Selected and New Poems: 1961-1981 (1982), a volume that included the best of his previous work, demonstrated Harrison’s range and complexity and established his as a major voice in American poetry. His collection The Theory and Practice of Rivers: Poems (1985) only served to demonstrate more fully both his breadth of interests and his mastery of the poetic form. The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems (1998) restores to print lyrics and protest poems of Plain Song, the effusive Letters to Yesenin, and the Zen-inspired After Ikkyu, and Other Poems (1996).
In addition to novels and poetry, Harrison has published numerous essays, predominantly in Sports Illustrated and Esquire. In many of his essays, Harrison emerges as an amateur naturalist who denounces those who violate fish and game laws, sings the praises of seasoned guides and ardent canoe racers, and laments the passing of the wilderness in the face of urban development. Harrison has also published some food-related nonfiction, including The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001), and the memoir Off to the Side (2002).
Achievements
Jim Harrison, a venturesome and talented writer, proved himself an able poet, novelist, and journalist by revitalizing the territories and boundaries explored by others. Along with Nebraska, the territory of Ted Kooser and Willa Cather, both northern Michigan and Key West, the Hemingway provinces, are re-created in Harrison’s work. Also present are the subterranean worlds and the connecting roads that the Beats had earmarked, the relatively unsullied outback celebrated by Edward Abbey and Theodore Roethke, and the predominantly masculine worlds explored by writers such as Harrison’s friend and fellow hunter Thomas McGuane and Larry McMurtry.
However, it was Denise Levertov who helped Harrison publish his first book of poetry, Plain Song. It was not long after that when he received the first of three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1967 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. These helped him to settle down in the Leelenau Peninsula in northern Michigan and to focus on poetry and finally fiction in the early 1970’s. After steadily developing a literary following over two decades, and having his work published in twenty-seven languages, in 1999 Harrison was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and he was awarded the Colorado Review’s Evil Companions Award, along with Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2000, he received the Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award and the Michigan State University Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 2007, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Harrison’s greatest achievement, however, might be the fact that he has never changed his approach to theme, style, setting, and characterization to suit anyone but himself, his friends, and his readers. He has held fast to his vision of art as nature, all as real and true as a birch tree or brown trout, and let the scholars and journalists come to him. In fact, the same things for which reviewers criticized him in his first novel, Wolf, were the things that reviewers applauded about his 2007 novel Returning to Earth. By refusing to limit himself to a single genre and by attending to “audible things, things moving at noon in full raw light,” Harrison appeals to a diversified audience and portrays an integrated vision that reflects the subtler nuances of the physical and natural world. While his references are often esoteric, he is a masterful storyteller who easily blends primitive and naturalistic images with arcane literary allusions. The reader is thus able to hear and feel simultaneously the meaning and motion of objects and experiences.
Bibliography
Davis, Todd. “A Spiritual Topography: Northern Michigan in the Poetry of Jim Harrison.” Midwest Quarterly 42, no. 1 (Autumn, 2000): 94-104. Examines the spiritual topography in the poetry of Harrison, specifically 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.
Harrison, Jim. Interviews. Conversations with Jim Harrison. Edited by Robert DeMott. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. This collection of interviews with Harrison includes bibliographic references and an index.
_______. “Pleasures of the Hard-Won Life: An Interview with Jim Harrison.” Interview by Charles McGrath. The New York Times Book Review, January 25, 2007, p. 27-28. Discusses how Harrison’s love of food and hard drinking led to health problems that have altered his lifestyle but not his zest for living.
Orr, Gregg, and Beef Torrey. Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1964-2008. Introduction by Robert De Mott. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. This bibliography lists all the works of Harrison, whether print or other media, as well as reviews and interviews, both by and of the writer.
Pichaske, David R. Rooted: Seven Midwest Writers of Place. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. The chapter on Harrison is entitled “Reluctant Postmodernist,” and looks at how the upper Michigan region plays a part in Harrison’s writings.
Reilly, Edward C. Jim Harrison. New York: Twayne, 1996. In this book of Harrison criticism, Reilly discusses the ways in which Harrison uses his writing as a medium for social commentary, among other topics.
Seaman, Donna. Review of In Search of Small Gods. Booklist 105, no. 13 (March 1, 2009): 15. This review of Harrison’s poetry collection finds the poet creating a self-deprecating self-portrait. The poems deal with death, mortality, nature, and Harrison’s daily life.
Smith, Patrick A. The True Bones of My Life. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002. 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. As part of an omnibus review, Taylor applies his considerable critical skills to an appreciation of Harrison’s The Shape of the Journey.
Veale, Scott. “Eat Drink Man Woman.” Review of The Shape of the Journey. The New York Times Book Review, January 3, 1999, p. 15. In this brief review, Veale finds this collection to have “a meandering feeling.” He praises Harrison’s grounding in the natural world, especially in those poems set in rural Michigan. He also values Harrison’s colloquial style.
