JIM HARRISON

Jim Harrison is a widely admired poet, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter who received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and Comparative Literature from Michigan State University in 1960 and 1966 respectively. Born in Grayling in 1937, raised in Reed City and Haslett, he is the son of a county agent who moved the Harrison family to the East Lansing area so his children could attend Michigan State University.

The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Harrison is an artist whose work enjoys a substantial world-wide following among critics and general readers alike. His novels and novellas - including Wolf (1971), A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), Legends of the Fall (1979) , Warlock (1981), Sundog (1984), Dalva (1988), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), Julip (1994), The Road Home (1999), and The Beast God Forgot to Invent (2000) - have been published in twenty-two languages, and many of them have been adapted to the screen as feature motion pictures.

His nine volumes of poetry include Plain Song (1965), Locations (1968), Letters to Yesenin (1970), The Theory and Practice of Rivers (1989), After Ikkyu (1996), and The Shape of the Journey (1998). Last year Harrison published his first children's book, The Boy Who Ran to the Woods (2000), which is a semi-autobiographical account of his own childhood in northern Michigan.

His only book of non-fiction is Just Before Dark (1991), an anthology of work from three decades that includes essays on food, travel, literature, and the natural world which have appeared in publications as disparate as Sports Illustrated, Esquire (where he once served as food editor), and Psychoanalytic Review. A French film documentary about Harrison, The Hour of the Wolf, was released in Europe in 1993.

Click here to see Special Collections' holdings of author Jim Harrison's work

For more information on Jim Harrison, please go to: http://jimharrison.org

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