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Jim Harrison, "Legends Of The Fall" Writer, Dies At 78
Topic Started: Mar 29 2016, 01:21 AM (44 Views)
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New York Times: Jim Harrison - Poet, Essayist & Novelist - Dies At 78

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Jim Harrison, whose lust for life — and sometimes just plain lust — roared into print in a vast, celebrated body of fiction, poetry and essays that with ardent abandon explored the natural world, the life of the mind and the pleasures of the flesh, died on Saturday at his home in Patagonia, Ariz. He was 78. The cause was heart failure, his publisher, Grove Atlantic, said on Monday.

A native of Michigan, Mr. Harrison lived most recently during the summers in the wild countryside near Livingston, Mont., where he enthusiastically shot the rattlesnakes that colonized his yard, and during the winters in Patagonia, where he enthusiastically shot all kinds of things.

In both places, far from the self-regarding literary soirees of New York, for which he had little but contempt, and the lucre of Hollywood, where he had done time as a dazzlingly dissolute if not altogether successful screenwriter, he could engage in the essential, monosyllabic pursuits that defined the borders of his life: to walk, drive, hunt, fish, cook, drink, smoke, write.

The result was prodigious: 21 volumes of fiction, including “Legends of the Fall” (1979), a collection of three novellas whose title piece, about a Montana family ravaged by World War I, became a 1994 film starring Brad Pitt; 14 books of poetry; two books of essays; a memoir; and a children’s book.

His most recent book of fiction, “The Ancient Minstrel,” was published this month. A book of poetry, “Dead Man’s Float,” was published this year.

In Mr. Harrison’s fiction, especially, lay some of the most vivid, violent and evocative writing of its day — work that in the estimation of many critics captured the resonant, almost mythic soul of 20th-century rural America.

“His books glisten with love of the world, and are as grounded as Thoreau’s in the particulars of American place — its rivers and thickets, its highways and taverns,” Will Blythe wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 2007, reviewing Mr. Harrison’s novel “Returning to Earth.” He added, “Bawdily and with unrelenting gusto, Harrison’s 40 years’ worth of writing explores what constitutes a good life, both aesthetically and morally, on this planet.”

-Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/arts/jim-harrison-free-spirited-writer-dies-at-78.html?_r=1
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