James Harrison (December 11, 1937 – March 26, 2016) was an American writer 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 which explains their sense of rugged intelligence and common sense. They attune themselves to both the natural and the civilized world, surrounded by excesses, but determined to live their lives as well as possible.Harrison was born in Grayling, Michigan, to Winfield Sprague Harrison, a county agricultural agent, and Norma Olivia (Wahlgren) Harrison, both avid readers. Harrison was born 18 months after oldest child John, with whom Jim was close. Jim's younger siblings are Judith and then Mary and David. He became blind in one eye after a childhood accident ("My left eye is blind and jogs like/a milky sparrow in its socket"). Harrison graduated from Haslett High School (Haslett, Michigan) in 1956. When he was 24, on November 21, 1962, his father and sister Judy died in an automobile accident. In 1959, he married Linda King, with whom he had two daughters. He was educated at Michigan State University, where he received a BA (1960) and MA (1964) in comparative literature. After a short stint as assistant professor of English at Stony Brook University (1965–66), Harrison started working full-time as a writer. His awards include National Academy of Arts grants (1967, 1968, and 1969), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969–70), the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2007). His work has appeared in many leading publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Outside, Playboy, Men's Journal, and The New York Times Book Review. He published several collections of novellas, two of which were eventually turned into films: Revenge (1990) and Legends of the Fall (1994). Much of Harrison's writing is set in sparsely populated regions of North America and its West. Many stories are set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Montana's mountains, and along the Arizona–Mexico border. Harrison died of a heart attack on March 26, 2016.

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