Another good one gone

The Washington Post has an obituary by Yanan Wang for Jim Harrison:

In the waning years of his life, Jim Harrison split his time between the countryside near Livingston, Montana, and small-town Patagonia, Arizona. The prolific poet-novelist, who famously sported a luscious beard and mustache that many likened to that of Pancho Villa, spent his days hunting, cooking, and writing to the end. Harrison died on Saturday at his home in Patagonia, his publisher, Grove Atlantic, confirmed to The Associated Press. He was 78 years old.
“Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him,” a Sunday Times of London reviewer once said, an assessment that would be repeated over and over, on book jackets and by his legion of admirers.
The author of more than thirty books, Harrison was a lifelong outdoorsman who gained wide renown after the publication, in middle age, of the bestselling 1979 novella Legends of the Fall. The story, which follows the journey of three brothers from Montana to Alberta to fight in the Canadian forces prior to the America’s entry into World War One, cemented the kind of storytelling for which Harrison was known: moral, dark and resplendent with descriptions of the natural world.
“His voice came from the American heartland and his deep and abiding love of the American landscape runs through his extraordinary body of work,” Grove Atlantic chief executive Morgan Entrekin said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Harrison was a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was the rare writer who excelled in both poetry and prose, earning comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Harrison began his career as a poet, but started working on his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, while recovering from a bird-hunting injury. (He had fallen off a cliff.)

 

He also had credits in Hollywood, where, as a scriptwriter, Harrison befriended Orson Welles, Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson, who financed his writing of Legends of the Fall after his 1976 novel Farmer failed to sell well, and he was so broke he couldn’t pay his taxes, according to The Associated Press. Later, after Legends of the Fall became a movie starring Brad Pitt, there was one year in which Harrison made more money than the president of General Motors.
Born in Grayling, Michigan, Harrison grew up among the natural landscapes that would shape his writing, learning to hunt and fish at age four. As family friend Tom Bissell put it in Outside: “For Harrison, the natural world was not something to be cherished because it was pretty; rather the natural world was something to be howled at, gloriously, in the night.”
Two early events made him a writer, Harrison told Esquire in 2014. The first occurred when he was seven years old and got in a quarrel with a neighborhood girl. She pushed a broken glass bottle into his face, blinding him in his left eye. “I probably wouldn’t have been a poet if I hadn’t lost my left eye when I was a boy,” Harrison said. “Afterward, I retreated to the natural world and never really came back, you know.”
Then, when he was twenty, his father and sister were killed in a car accident. Their sudden deaths solidified his determination to write: “I thought, if this can happen to people, might as well do what you want, which was to be a writer. Don’t compromise; there’s no point in it.”
With a bachelor’s and a master’s in comparative literature from Michigan State University, Harrison believed firmly that good writing could only be accomplished through utter devotion. To young writers seeking guidance, he said: “I don’t have any time to talk to you unless you intend to give your entire life over to it, because it can’t be done otherwise.”
Yet, tales of Harrison’s eclectic lifestyle outside of writing accompanied many descriptions of his work. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1986, he recounted the years he spent doing manual labor, working as a block layer, carpenter, and well-pit digger. He was one of five children in a family that had little money, so Harrison did these jobs to sustain his writing. Attached to the thrill of exploration, he hitchhiked to California and New York City, arriving in the latter with his favorite books, a typewriter his father gave him for his sixteenth birthday, and his clothes, all packed inside a cardboard box tied with rope.
Before Harrison’s first poetry collection, Plain Song, came out in 1965, he worked on a construction site. On one icy November day, he spent nine hours carting twelve hundred cement blocks for seventy yards in a wheelbarrow, then unloading them. “When I got home I was hungry and tired,” Harrison told The Paris Review, “and what I had to show for it was right around twenty-five dollars. But you got a lot of thinking done.” These experiences formed a physical stature that recalled at once a beer salesman and a sumo wrestler. His stories followed men contending with wild, untouched areas of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, virile subject matter that compelled some to characterize him as a macho writer.
It was a label that Harrison himself rejected. “All I have to say about that macho thing goes back to the idea that my characters aren’t from the urban dream-coasts,” he told The Paris Review. “A man is not a foreman on a dam project because he wants to be macho.”
One of Harrison’s most acclaimed works, Dalva, is narrated by a female protagonist, a strong Nebraska woman who rides bareback through the plains in search of a child she’d given up for adoption.
Aside from writing and the outdoors, Harrison’s other great passion was food. Reporters who visited his cabin in Michigan were treated to veritable feasts, conjured by him and his wife of more than fifty years, Linda King. His insatiable appetite produced plenty of writing fodder, including a legendary piece in The New Yorker, aptly titled A Really Big Lunch, that recounted him eating a forty-course meal. In 1992, he published a memoir called The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand.
Despite recent struggles with gout, shingles, and diabetes, Harrison continued producing work into old age. His last book of poetry, Dead Man’s Float, was published in October of 2015. The collection and several of his later works were preoccupied with mortality.
Harrison’s wife died last fall. They are survived by two daughters.
In a commemorative post on Sunday, Grove Atlantic quoted his 2009 poem Larson’s Holstein Bull:

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh
Death is that angelic farm girl
[…]
Death steals everything except our stories.

Rico says some writers (like Hemingway), he'd love to have met, and Harrison was one...