Jim Harrison

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".

He was a writer and producer, known for Wolf (1994), Legends of the Fall (1994) and Revenge (1990). He was married to Linda King.

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.

Jim Harrison was born on December 11, 1937 in Grayling, Michigan, USA as James Thomas Harrison.