In his fiction, poetry and essays, Jim Harrison, who has died aged 78 after a heart attack, displayed a unique voice, drawn from the hardness born of isolation within the vast perplexity of the US, especially its outdoors. One reviewer said he had “few equals as a writer on outdoor life, the traditional heritage and proving ground of the American male”. Harrison is best known for Legends of the Fall (1979), a collection of three connected novellas whose title story became the 1994 film with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins.
Because his work seemed anchored in American masculinity, many critics either praised or dismissed him in terms of Ernest Hemingway. The comparison was easy. Harrison looked the part: a burly, bearded one-eyed man with a husky voice ravaged by drinking and smoking. His work, like Hemingway’s early stories, was often set outdoors in northern Michigan, where he lived much of his life. When he first moved from poetry to prose, Harrison’s writing had some of Hemingway’s tautness, but he wrote in a freer, Beat-like prose with more relaxed humour.
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