Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life

Goddard, a literature professor at Utah Valley University, debuts with a robust biography of novelist, poet, and screenwriter Jim Harrison (1937–2016). The author paints a vivid portrait of Harrison’s tumultuous life, from his childhood in rural Michigan, where an accident left him permanently blind in one eye and he developed a deep love of nature, to his early work as a member of a raucous 1960s poetry scene in New York City before he found commercial and critical success as a novelist with the publication of Legends of the Fall in 1979. Along the way, Goddard effectively captures Harrison’s inner conflict: his primary love was poetry, but he’s best known as a novelist. In Goddard’s hands, Harrison emerges as a complicated man possessing large appetites for drinking, smoking, food, and sex (he had a “surprising callousness about extramarital flings,” Goddard writes). Harrison’s 55-year marriage to his wife, Linda, is a frustrating archival blind spot (the two mostly communicated by phone, not letters) acknowledged by Goddard, who gives readers a much deeper view of Harrison’s evolving character and development as an artist via correspondences with his friend, novelist Thomas McGuane. It’s a perceptive account of a prolific and celebrated artist. (Nov.)