Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison
James "Jim" Harrisonwas an American author known for his poetry, fiction, reviews, essays about the outdoors, and writings about food. He is best known for his 1979 novella Legends of the Fall. He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage in spite of their intelligence and some...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 December 1937
CountryUnited States of America
That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.
This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.
Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot.
It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs.
As an English major I was familiar with the stories of dozens of writers trying to get their work done among the multifarious diversions of the world and the hurdles of their own vices. A professor had said that what saved writers is that they, like politicians, had the illusion of destiny that allowed them to overcome obstacles no matter how nominal their work.
I had let my digust with teaching ruin my love of literature.
I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.
When we die we are only stories in the minds of others, I thought
I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.
Nothing on my trip thus far was as I expected which shows you that rather than simply read about the United States you have to log the journey.
I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.
I do have trouble with titles.
After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.
Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.