|
Jim
Harrison
|
|
The
recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Jim Harrison is a poet,
novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work enjoys a substantial
world-wide following among critics and general readers alike.
His novels and novellas--including Wolf, A Good
Day to Die,
Farmer, Legends of the Fall, Warlock, Sundog, Dalva, The
Woman Lit by Fireflies, Julip, The Road Home, and The
Beast God Forgot to Invent--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, Locations, Letters
to Yesenin, The
Theory and Practice of Rivers, After Ikkyu, and The
Shape of the Journey. In 2000, Harrison published his first children's
book, The Boy Who Ran to the Woods, which is a semi-autobiographical
account of his own childhood in northern Michigan.
His only book of non-fiction is Just
Before Dark, 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 and The Hour of the Wolf was
released in Europe in 1993.
Harrison 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 novella all but boils over with dreams -- dreams
of literature, love, loss, of all those epic L-words that too
few writers seem brave enough, in these chilly times, to address
on anything but ironic terms. "I Forgot to Go to Spain" is
imbued with all the gravelly melancholy of a Tom Waits ballad,
but it never once, despite that swarm of L-words, forces sentiment;
the autumnal passion that drives the tale is never less than
tactile. I could go on -- about the casual lack of geometry
and astounding texture of Harrison's prose, about the delicacy
of his characterizations -- but why? "I Forgot to Go to
Spain" is above my twerpy praise. It's simply thrilling
to see a writer reach for the sky and actually grab it." -Jonathan
Miles
For more information on Jim Harrison, please visit http://www.lectures.org/harrison.html.
To view Special Collections' holdings of Harrison's work, please
click here.
|
|
| |
| |
| |
|
|
| |
| |
| Page Editor: BreezySilver |
Last Updated:
January 19, 2010
|
|
