Jim Harrison biography

Jim Harrison Biography

Jim Harrison spent much of his life in Michigan on a farm near where he was born. His connection to rural landscapes was evident in his free-verse, imagistic poetry, which often explored human and animal drives set against an unforgiving natural world.

Educated at Michigan State University, Harrison taught briefly at SUNY Stony Brook. After the publication of his first collection of poetry, Plain Song (1965), he returned to Michigan, where he worked as a freelance journalist and laborer until he began to earn a living from his writing.

Harrison has published more than a dozen collections of poetry and has also built a reputation as a fiction writer, publishing numerous novels and collections. His book Legends of the Fall (1979), received considerable critical acclaim and was made into a 1995 feature film. Harrison wrote several screenplays for Warner Bros. and other studios.

Harrison was poetry editor of The Nation and co-editor of Sumac. He wrote a food column, "The Raw and the Cooked," for Esquire magazine, and his collection of essays, Just Before Dark (1991), included some of his food writing along with literary and nature essays.

He died aged 78 in March 2016

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