Most Recommended Books

Track reading, wishlists & new-book alerts

Get
Skip to content
Share:

Jim Harrison Books in Order

Explore Jim Harrison's books in order with quick summaries, reading tips, and where to start, plus notes on his novels, novellas, poems, and essays.

Last updated: December 25, 2025

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases (at no extra cost to you).

View

Publication Order

Sort:

141 books

Conversations with Jimmy Carter

by Jim Harrison

2023

Interviews with Jimmy Carter spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

The Search for the Genuine: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

by Jim Harrison

2022

A large selection of Harrison's nonfiction, bringing together essays on food, travel, fishing and hunting, and books. It reads like a long conversation with an opinionated, funny guide who keeps changing his mind in public.

Jim Harrison

by Jim Harrison

2020

A focused poetry volume gathering Jim Harrison's ghazals, a form built on repeating lines and sudden turns. The poems move between desire, hunger, and the wild, using the form's music to sharpen his plain talk.

Jim Harrison

by Jim Harrison

2019

A selection of Jim Harrison's most representative poems, chosen from across his career. It's a strong entry point to his poetic voice, mixing nature writing, lust, grief, and blunt humor in compact lines.

A Really Big Lunch

by Jim Harrison

2017

A selection of Jim Harrison's food writing and personal essays, moving from French bistros to home kitchens. Between meals he talks about travel, friendship, and aging, in a voice that stays blunt and funny.

The Ancient Minstrel

by Jim Harrison

2016

Harrison's late collection of novellas, moving between Michigan and farther-off roads, where older characters look for meaning in sex, friendship, and the natural world. The stories mix barroom comedy with moments of hard-earned clarity.

The Big Seven

by Jim Harrison

2015

Retired detective Sunderson is back in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, older, meaner, and trying to keep his head down. When violence and old grudges arrive next door, his quiet retirement turns into a messy investigation.

Dead Man's Float

by Jim Harrison

2015

A late poetry collection that keeps circling hunger, weather, animals, and the plain fact of getting older. Harrison moves between rough humor and sudden tenderness, with short poems that feel like notes from the field.

The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

2013

A trio of novellas about aging bodies, sudden lust, and the pull of water and wilderness. Harrison's characters keep trying to start over, even when history, family, and habit are already in the room.

Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems

by Jim Harrison

2013

A career-spanning poetry gathering that mixes earlier work with later poems, showing how Harrison returned again and again to hunger, animals, weather, and grief. The voice stays direct and human, even when the subject turns dark.

Brown Dog

by Jim Harrison

2013

A linked set of stories following Brown Dog, a mixed-blood misfit in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as he drifts through jobs, women, and trouble. It's funny and bleak at once, with the woods always close and civilization never quite trusted.

Songs of Unreason

by Jim Harrison

2011

Poems that roam through wild places, memory, and the body, often in quick, conversational bursts. Harrison leans into contradiction, grief, and appetite, letting small observations open into bigger questions.

Great Leader

by Jim Harrison

2011

Detective Sunderson, close to retirement, starts looking into a self-styled guru running a cult near his Upper Peninsula home. What seems like local weirdness turns darker, and Sunderson's own appetites and doubts keep getting in the way.

The Etiquette of Freedom

by Jim Harrison

2010

A wide-ranging essay collection that swings from hunting and fishing to books, travel, and the stubborn pleasures of eating well. Harrison mixes story, opinion, and hard-won experience without smoothing the edges.

The Farmer's Daughter

by Jim Harrison

2009

Three novellas that range from rural desire to family fallout, including a return to Brown Dog in a later stage of his hard-living life. Harrison writes with rough tenderness, letting the landscape press against every decision.

In Search of Small Gods

by Jim Harrison

2009

A poetry collection grounded in the natural world, with poems that balance awe and skepticism. Harrison writes about animals, weather, desire, and loss, looking for meaning in small, stubborn details.

The English Major

by Jim Harrison

2008

After a bruising divorce, a former teacher and farmer hits the road with a plan to visit all fifty states. The trip turns into a funny, aching tour of motels, old friends, lust, and late-life reinvention.

Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro

by Kazuo Ishiguro

2008

Interviews with Kazuo Ishiguro spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

2007

Told through several linked voices, this novel follows an extended family in Michigan's Upper Peninsula as illness forces them to talk honestly about love, obligation, and what they owe each other. It's a story about reconciliation, not easy fixes.

Conversations with Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

2007

Interviews with Wendell Berry spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Sonia Sanchez

by Jim Harrison

2007

Interviews with Sonia Sanchez spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Leon Forrest

by Jim Harrison

2007

Interviews with Leon Forrest spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Larry Brown

by Jim Harrison

2007

Interviews with Larry Brown spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Saving Daylight

by Jim Harrison

2006

Poems that pay attention to daylight, seasons, and the way time slips. Harrison writes about love, anger, animals, and the body as it changes, mixing plain talk with sudden lyric turns.

Conversations with Thomas McGuane

by Jim Harrison

2006

Interviews with Thomas McGuane spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

2005

A collection of three late novellas about marriages, politics, and the ways people lie to themselves to get through a season. Harrison keeps the stakes human and close, with quick humor and sudden sadness.

Conversations with Robert Penn Warren

by Jim Harrison

2005

Interviews with Robert Penn Warren spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Jack Kerouac

by Jim Harrison

2005

Interviews with Jack Kerouac spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Isaac Asimov

by Jim Harrison

2005

Interviews with Isaac Asimov spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Gore Vidal

by Jim Harrison

2005

Interviews with Gore Vidal spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Gabriel Garceda Me1rquez

by Jim Harrison

2005

Interviews with Gabriel Garceda Me1rquez spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Don DeLillo

by Jim Harrison

2005

Interviews with Don DeLillo spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

True North

by Jim Harrison

2004

A son tries to make sense of his family's past and his father's damaging legacy in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. As he digs into old violence and money, the novel becomes a hard look at inheritance, guilt, and the cost of looking away.

Conversations with Ray Bradbury

by Jim Harrison

2004

Interviews with Ray Bradbury spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations With John le Carre9

by Jim Harrison

2004

Interviews with John le Carre9 spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Gloria Naylor

by Jim Harrison

2004

Interviews with Gloria Naylor spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Audre Lorde

by Jim Harrison

2004

Interviews with Audre Lorde spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Joseph Brodsky: Conversations

by Jim Harrison

2003

Interviews with Joseph Brodsky spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Stanley Kaufmann

by Jim Harrison

2003

Interviews with Stanley Kaufmann spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Rita Dove

by Jim Harrison

2003

Interviews with Rita Dove spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks

by Jim Harrison

2003

Interviews with Gwendolyn Brooks spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald

by Jim Harrison

2003

Interviews with F. Scott Fitzgerald spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Braided Creek

by Jim Harrison

2003

A book of short poems exchanged between Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, written like quick letters. The pieces are funny, warm, and attentive to birds, weather, food, and the ordinary days that make up a life.

Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

2002

Harrison's memoir, told in brisk scenes and sideways reflections, from growing up in Michigan to building a life as a working writer. He writes about friendships, failures, reading, and the daily discipline behind the books.

Elie Wiesel: Conversations

by Jim Harrison

2002

Interviews with Elie Wiesel spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Mary Gordon

by Jim Harrison

2002

Interviews with Mary Gordon spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Margaret Walker

by Jim Harrison

2002

Interviews with Margaret Walker spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Jim Harrison

by Jim Harrison

2002

A collection of interviews with Jim Harrison, spanning decades of talk about poetry, fiction, hunting, food, and the writing life. He argues, jokes, and reflects, giving a candid sense of how his work and habits evolved.

Conversations with Erica Jong

by Jim Harrison

2002

Interviews with Erica Jong spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Clarence Major

by Jim Harrison

2002

Interviews with Clarence Major spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

The Raw and the Cooked

by Jim Harrison

2001

Essays about food, travel, and sport, written with Harrison's mix of appetite and skepticism. He moves from restaurants and recipes to fishing trips and literary arguments, always circling back to what pleasure costs.

Conversations with Richard Ford

by Jim Harrison

2001

Interviews with Richard Ford spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Christopher Isherwood

by Jim Harrison

2001

Interviews with Christopher Isherwood spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Chaim Potok

by Jim Harrison

2001

Interviews with Chaim Potok spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

The Boy Who Ran to the Woods

by Jim Harrison

2000

A short children's story about a boy named Jimmy who suffers a serious eye injury and struggles with anger afterward. In the Michigan woods, animals and quiet routines help him find steadier ground.

The Beast God Forgot to Invent

by Jim Harrison

2000

Three novellas that lean into Harrison's mix of yearning and misbehavior, with characters chasing sex, money, or escape and finding consequences instead. The stories are compact but spacious in memory, drifting between comedy and regret.

Conversations with William S. Burroughs

by Jim Harrison

2000

Interviews with William S. Burroughs spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Salman Rushdie

by Jim Harrison

2000

Interviews with Salman Rushdie spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko

by Jim Harrison

2000

Interviews with Leslie Marmon Silko spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations With William Faulkner

by Jim Harrison

1999

Interviews with William Faulkner spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations With John Fowles

by Jim Harrison

1999

Interviews with John Fowles spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with E. L. Doctorow

by Jim Harrison

1999

Interviews with E. L. Doctorow spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

The Shape of the Journey

by Jim Harrison

1998

A selected poetry volume that gathers work from across Harrison's early decades. The poems move between the Midwest and the West, mixing blunt humor with close attention to birds, weather, desire, and loss.

The Road Home

by Jim Harrison

1998

A return to the world of Dalva Northridge, told through a different narrator who tracks the family across decades. The novel moves between Nebraska history and present-day longing, asking what we inherit and what we can repair.

Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston

by Jim Harrison

1998

Interviews with Maxine Hong Kingston spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Denise Levertov

by Jim Harrison

1998

Interviews with Denise Levertov spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with V. S. Naipaul

by Jim Harrison

1997

Interviews with V. S. Naipaul spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with N. Scott Momaday

by Jim Harrison

1997

Interviews with N. Scott Momaday spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Chinua Achebe

by Jim Harrison

1997

Interviews with Chinua Achebe spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

More Conversations with Eudora Welty

by Jim Harrison

1996

More interviews with Eudora Welty, continuing discussion of books, craft, and life. Read after the first volume to catch the later voice and concerns.

Conversations with Pauline Kael

by Jim Harrison

1996

Interviews with Pauline Kael spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop

by Jim Harrison

1996

Interviews with Elizabeth Bishop spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Derek Walcott

by Jim Harrison

1996

Interviews with Derek Walcott spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

After Ikkyu and Other Poems

by Jim Harrison

1996

Late poems that keep company with aging, hunger, and the natural world. Harrison nods to the poet-monk Ikkyu while staying rooted in his own plainspoken voice and quick, sharp turns.

Conversations with Susan Sontag

by Jim Harrison

1995

Interviews with Susan Sontag spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Ralph Ellison

by Jim Harrison

1995

Interviews with Ralph Ellison spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Ishmael Reed

by Jim Harrison

1995

Interviews with Ishmael Reed spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Ernest Gaines

by Jim Harrison

1995

Interviews with Ernest Gaines spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Chester Himes

by Jim Harrison

1995

Interviews with Chester Himes spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Julip

by Jim Harrison

1994

A trio of novellas that moves between jailhouses, bars, and back roads, following people who make bad choices for understandable reasons. Harrison keeps the tone darkly funny, with sex and violence never far from the surface.

Conversations with Toni Morrison

by Jim Harrison

1994

Interviews with Toni Morrison spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Saul Bellow

by Jim Harrison

1994

Interviews with Saul Bellow spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

by Jim Harrison

1994

A collection of interviews that offers insight into the unique literary partnership between Erdrich and Dorris. They discuss their collaborative process, the themes of their individual books, and the complexities of writing about Native American experience.

Conversations with Henry Miller

by Jim Harrison

1994

Interviews with Henry Miller spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Amiri Baraka

by Jim Harrison

1994

Interviews with Amiri Baraka spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

More Conversations with Walker Percy

by Jim Harrison

1993

More interviews with Walker Percy, continuing discussion of books, craft, and life. Read after the first volume to catch the later voice and concerns.

Just Before Dark

by Jim Harrison

1993

A gathering of nonfiction pieces, from food and travel writing to literary essays and memories from the road. Read together, they show Harrison's range and his habit of finding a story in almost any place.

Conversations with Richard Wright

by Jim Harrison

1993

Interviews with Richard Wright spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Paul Bowles

by Jim Harrison

1993

Interviews with Paul Bowles spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations With Thornton Wilder

by Jim Harrison

1992

Interviews with Thornton Wilder spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Robert Coles

by Jim Harrison

1992

Interviews with Robert Coles spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Nikki Giovanni

by Jim Harrison

1992

Interviews with Nikki Giovanni spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher

by Jim Harrison

1992

Interviews with M. F. K. Fisher spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Reynolds Price

by Jim Harrison

1991

Interviews with Reynolds Price spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer

by Jim Harrison

1991

Interviews with Elizabeth Spencer spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Bernard Malamud

by Jim Harrison

1991

Interviews with Bernard Malamud spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

1990

Three novellas set among driftless lives and sudden passions, including the first appearance of Brown Dog in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Harrison writes with quick comedy and sharp pain, letting small decisions turn into lasting trouble.

The Theory and Practice of Rivers and New Poems

by Jim Harrison

1990

Poems that use rivers as both real places and working metaphors, moving between landscape and inner weather. Harrison writes with a steady eye for detail and a sense of time passing, sometimes with a grin.

Conversations with Tom Wolfe

by Jim Harrison

1990

Interviews with Tom Wolfe spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Richard Wilbur

by Jim Harrison

1990

Interviews with Richard Wilbur spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Raymond Carver

by Jim Harrison

1990

Interviews with Raymond Carver spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with John Gardner

by Jim Harrison

1990

Interviews with John Gardner spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Eugene O'Neill

by Jim Harrison

1990

Interviews with Eugene O'Neill spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Shelby Foote

by Jim Harrison

1989

Interviews with Shelby Foote spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Robertson Davies

by Jim Harrison

1989

Interviews with Robertson Davies spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Robert Graves

by Jim Harrison

1989

Interviews with Robert Graves spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates

by Jim Harrison

1989

Interviews with Joyce Carol Oates spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with James Baldwin

by Jim Harrison

1989

This volume gathers twenty seven interviews with Baldwin from 1961 to 1987, drawn from newspapers, radio, and journals. The conversations show his shifting thoughts on literature, politics, sexuality, faith, and what it meant to live as a Black writer between two continents.

Dalva

by Jim Harrison

1988

Dalva Northridge, a middle-aged social worker, heads back to her family's Nebraska roots and the history she has tried to outrun. As she searches for the daughter she gave up, the story opens into a multigenerational saga tied to the Sioux and the land.

Conversations with Norman Mailer

by Jim Harrison

1988

Interviews with Norman Mailer spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut

by Jim Harrison

1988

Gathering interviews from across his career, this book lets Vonnegut talk about his books, his war experiences, his politics, and his writing habits in his own conversational voice. The exchanges show him by turns generous, cranky, and funny as he fields questions from many eras.

Conversations with Erskine Caldwell

by Jim Harrison

1988

Interviews with Erskine Caldwell spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Edward Albee

by Jim Harrison

1988

Interviews with Edward Albee spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Truman Capote: Conversations

by Jim Harrison

1987

Interviews with Truman Capote spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Peter Taylor

by Jim Harrison

1987

Interviews with Peter Taylor spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Katherine Anne Porter

by Jim Harrison

1987

Interviews with Katherine Anne Porter spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Flannery O'Connor

by Jim Harrison

1987

Interviews with Flannery O'Connor spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Arthur Miller

by Jim Harrison

1987

Interviews with Arthur Miller spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Tennessee Williams

by Jim Harrison

1986

Interviews with Tennessee Williams spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Malcolm Cowley

by Jim Harrison

1986

Interviews with Malcolm Cowley spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman

by Jim Harrison

1986

Interviews with Lillian Hellman spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Ernest Hemingway

by Jim Harrison

1986

Interviews with Ernest Hemingway spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with William Styron

by Jim Harrison

1985

Interviews with William Styron spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Walker Percy

by Jim Harrison

1985

Interviews with Walker Percy spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations With Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Jim Harrison

1985

Interviews with Isaac Bashevis Singer spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Conversations with Eudora Welty

by Jim Harrison

1985

Interviews with Eudora Welty spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Sundog

by Jim Harrison

1984

After years building dams, foreman Robert Corvus Strang is injured and forced to look back on a life of work, travel, love, and damage. A journalist's visit prompts his tough, restless self-portrait.

Conversations with Graham Greene

by Jim Harrison

1983

Interviews with Graham Greene spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Warlock

by Jim Harrison

1982

Set in the frontier town of Warlock, New Mexico, this novel follows a community edging toward violence, with lawmen and outlaws testing what justice can mean. Harrison treats the West as messy human ground, not myth.

Selected & New Poems, 1961-1981

by Jim Harrison

1982

A wide snapshot of Harrison's early poetry, pairing selections from his first books with new work from the same period. The poems move through love, grief, and the outdoors in a direct, talk-to-you voice.

Natural World

by Jim Harrison

1982

Poems rooted in place, animals, weather, and the uneasy life of the body. Harrison's lines shift from rough humor to sudden clarity, keeping the natural world close and refusing easy comfort.

Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz

by Jim Harrison

1981

Interviews with Czeslaw Milosz spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Legends of the Fall

by Jim Harrison

1979

Three novellas about love, violence, and reinvention, including the title story of a father and three sons in the northern Rockies. The collection moves fast and hits hard, showing how a single choice can echo for years.

Farmer

by Jim Harrison

1976

A middle-aged teacher and farmer finds his ordinary life tilting into obsession, desire, and fear as he faces family illness and his own restlessness. Harrison keeps the story intimate, with dark humor and uncomfortable honesty.

Letters to Yesenin

by Jim Harrison

1973

A book-length sequence of poems addressed to the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, written as argument, confession, and tribute. Harrison uses the imagined correspondence to talk about drink, desire, art, and the urge to disappear.

A Good Day to Die

by Jim Harrison

1973

A group of restless young men drift into radical plans, and the line between protest and violence starts to blur. Set against threatened landscapes, the novel follows their anger, their bravado, and the consequences they can't control.

Wolf

by Jim Harrison

1971

A man retreats to the northern Michigan wilderness, hoping to glimpse a wolf, and ends up telling the story of his life. Part confession, part survival trip, it keeps circling loneliness, hunger, and the need to keep moving.

Outlyer and Ghazals

by Jim Harrison

1971

Poems that mix plainspoken narrative with the tight, repeating music of the ghazal. Harrison writes about sex, drinking, landscape, and mortality, letting form sharpen the bite of what he has to say.

Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges

by Jim Harrison

1969

Interviews with Jorge Luis Borges spanning their career, focused on key books, influences, and craft. A quick, candid way to hear the author in their own words.

Locations

by Jim Harrison

1968

A nonfiction collection built from travel notes, food writing, and literary pieces. Harrison moves through specific places and shows how a landscape can pull memory, mood, and argument into focus.

Plain Song

by Jim Harrison

1965

Harrison's debut poetry book, full of close looking at the natural world and the rough edges of young adulthood. The poems already show his mix of hunger, humor, and plain American speech.

Where should I start?

If you want the famous novellas: Legends of the FallThe Woman Lit by FirefliesThe Ancient Minstrel
If you prefer big, character-driven novels: DalvaThe Road HomeTrue NorthReturning to Earth
If you like a cranky detective noir: Great LeaderThe Big Seven
If you want essays about food and the outdoors: The Raw and the CookedA Really Big LunchThe Search for the Genuine: Nonfiction, 1970-2015
If you want poems first: In Search of Small GodsThe Theory and Practice of Rivers and New PoemsDead Man's Float

Author bio

Jim Harrison was a Michigan-born writer who moved easily between novels, novellas, poetry, and nonfiction. Over a career that ran for decades, he published more than three dozen books and wrote with the same curiosity about people, animals, weather, and appetite. He died in 2016, but the work still feels lived-in and physical.

He was born in Grayling, Michigan, and grew up in Haslett. His father worked as a county agricultural agent, so the outdoors wasn't a weekend hobby, it was part of the family's everyday life. A childhood accident left Harrison blind in one eye, and he often wrote with an extra-fine attention to sound, taste, and touch.

In 1962, Harrison's father and sister were killed in a car accident.

The loss didn't turn him into a sentimental writer. If anything, it sharpened his sense that joy and damage can sit in the same room, sometimes in the same sentence. He studied at Michigan State University, earning a BA in 1960 and an MA in comparative literature in 1964. He married Linda King in 1959, and they had two daughters.

After a short period teaching at Stony Brook University in the mid-1960s, he committed to writing full time. A few years later, he took a bad fall while bird hunting, and a friend, Thomas McGuane, suggested he use the recovery time to try a novel. That detour helped lead to Wolf: A False Memoir.

Harrison started as a poet and kept publishing poetry all the way through his last years. Along the way he picked up major support, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he became known as a writer who could shift forms without changing his voice. He never treated poetry as a side project, it was the place he went to listen to his own mind.

His fiction often returns to sparsely populated parts of the Midwest and the American West, places where people can hide, or unravel, in plain sight. Novels like Dalva, Sundog, Warlock, and True North mix family history with the pull of landscape, and they don't flinch from desire, addiction, or boredom. His characters are rarely polished. They're funny, lonely, hungry, and capable of real tenderness.

For many readers, the easiest entry is the novellas. Legends of the Fall brought him a wide audience, and several of those shorter works were adapted for film, including Revenge and Legends of the Fall. He liked the pressure of the form: one hard-driving story with no wasted air.

Food mattered to him.

Essay collections like The Raw and the Cooked and A Really Big Lunch move from restaurant tables to hunting camps to arguments about books, and many of those pieces began as magazine writing. He lived for long stretches in places like Livingston, Montana, and Patagonia, Arizona, and he even showed up on Anthony Bourdain's travel show for a meal and a conversation. If you want him in his own speaking voice, Off to the Side is a good companion, and The Search for the Genuine gathers decades of his nonfiction in one place. Even with all the genres, Harrison often said poetry was at the center of his life as a writer, and he kept returning to it right up to the end.

Edited by

Richard Reis

Software engineer whose passion for tracking book recommendations from podcasts inspired the creation of MRB.

Anurag Ramdasan

Lead investor at 3one4 Capital whose startup expertise and love for books helped shaped MRB and its growth.

Comments

Did we miss something? Have feedback?

Help us improve this page by sharing your thoughts

We only use your email to notify you about replies.

All comments are moderated.

Discover and track your reading on the go

Track your reading, manage wishlists, and get notified when new books are added.

All 141 Jim Harrison Books in Order (Complete List 2026)