Jim Harrison, RIP
Jim Harrison died Saturday past. For me Harrison is a major American writer, and his archetypal hero–a recently estranged hard drinking appetite aware man from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan eyeball deep in a mid-life crisis–takes on an aura shared with Huck Finn, Holden Caufield, Dean Moriarty…a well written and insightful obituary in the New York Times by Margalit Fox is here, and I agree with John Avalon in the Daily Beast that we’ve lost “America’s Greatest Living Writer.” If I had to recommend just five Jim Harrison works to someone unfamiliar with Harrison’s work, titles we have here in the collection, they’d be:
- Brown Dog: Novellas
- The Woman Lit by Fireflies
- The River Swimmer: Novellas
- Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
- Songs of Unreason
His “Art of Fiction” interview in the Paris Review is available, by way of preface…