Author Guide · Literary Fiction
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Jim Harrison lost the sight in his left eye at seven, when a neighbourhood girl pushed a broken bottle into his face, and spent the rest of his life in the woods and on the rivers of northern Michigan, Montana and Arizona. He started as a poet, with Plain Song in 1965, and only turned to fiction after a fall on the bank of the Manistee River left him in a back brace and his friend Tom McGuane told him to write a novel. In 1979 a 15,000-dollar loan from Jack Nicholson let him finish Legends of the Fall, and the book made him rich. He died at his writing desk in 2016, in the middle of a poem. This guide covers his 13 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 key books · 1971–2013 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Jim Harrison published more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and essays. His best-known are Legends of the Fall (1979), three novellas filmed in 1990 and 1994, the novel Dalva (1988), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990) and the Brown Dog novellas (collected 2013). Start with Legends of the Fall; the novella form is where he was strongest, and the title story is the one most readers know from the film.
Where to Start with Jim Harrison
If you want his defining book
→ Legends of the Fall (1979) — three novellas, including the Ludlow family saga.
If you want one big novel
→ Dalva (1988) — his first book narrated by a woman, set in Nebraska.
If you want him at his funniest
→ Brown Dog (2013) — six novellas about the same Michigan drifter.
If you want the late, gentler Harrison
→ The English Major (2008) — a sixty-year-old on a road trip across America.
13 Jim Harrison Books, in Order
Wolf
His first novel. Swanson, a restless man in his early thirties, camps alone in Michigan’s Huron Mountains hoping to see a wolf in the wild, and looks back over the drinking, women and cities of his twenties. Harrison wrote it while recovering from the back injury that pushed him from poetry to fiction.
A Good Day to Die
Three drifters — the narrator, a damaged Vietnam veteran named Tim and Tim’s girlfriend Sylvia — drive west with a vague plan to blow up a dam threatening the Grand Canyon. Britannica describes it as his more cynical treatment of environmental themes.
Farmer
Joseph, a schoolteacher and farmer in rural northern Michigan in the 1950s, is caught between the widow he has long meant to marry and a seventeen-year-old pupil. The book sold so badly that Harrison could not pay his taxes. It was filmed as Carried Away (1996).
Legends of the Fall
Three novellas: “Revenge”, “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” and the title story, about the Montana rancher Colonel William Ludlow and his three sons from before the First World War to the mid-twentieth century. Harrison took the Ludlow name from the journals of his wife’s great-grandfather. The book was a bestseller; “Revenge” was filmed with Kevin Costner in 1990, and the title story with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins in 1994.
Sundog
A writer travels to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to record the life of Robert Corvus Strang, a crippled former foreman who built dams around the world. The novel is mostly Strang’s talk — about work, women and faith — as the narrator tries to decide what to make of him.
Dalva
His first novel narrated by a woman. Dalva Northridge, in her forties, returns to her family’s land in Nebraska to look for the son she gave up for adoption as a teenager, while a historian works through her great-grandfather’s journals about the Plains Indian wars. It is usually counted among his best books and was made into a television film in 1996.
The Woman Lit by Fireflies
Three novellas. “Brown Dog” introduces the Michigan drifter who would carry five more stories; “Sunset Limited” reunites old 1960s radicals; and in the title novella a wealthy Michigan woman, Clare, walks away from her husband at an Iowa rest stop and spends the night in a cornfield.
The Road Home
The sequel to Dalva, told by five members of the Northridge family across the twentieth century, beginning with Dalva’s grandfather John Wesley Northridge and ending with Dalva herself and the son she has found again.
Off to the Side
His memoir of a Michigan childhood and the life that followed: poetry, the Beat years in Boston and New York, food, drink, hunting and Hollywood, which he once compared to being trapped in a “shuddering elevator”. His father and sister had been killed in a car accident in 1962.
True North
David Burkett, heir to a timber family that grew rich stripping the forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, sets out to write the history of what his family did, and to reckon with his father. Britannica describes it as a novel of family history, sexuality and nature.
Returning to Earth
A follow-up to True North. Donald, a Chippewa-Finnish man of forty-five dying of ALS in Marquette, dictates his family’s history to his wife Cynthia for their children; the later parts are told by those he leaves behind, including Cynthia and her brother David.
The English Major
Cliff, a former English teacher and cherry farmer in his sixties, is left by his wife and loses the farm, and sets off across the United States with an old jigsaw puzzle map, planning to rename the states and their birds. One of his lightest and most comic novels.
Brown Dog
All six novellas about B.D., a pulp cutter, diver, poacher and occasional drunk from northern Michigan with his own private morality, written between 1990 and 2013. Five appeared in earlier collections; the last, “He Dog”, was new and finds B.D. getting older.
In What Order to Read Jim Harrison
Most of Harrison’s books stand alone, with two exceptions. Dalva comes before The Road Home, and True North before Returning to Earth. The Brown Dog novellas were scattered across five collections from 1990 onwards; Brown Dog (2013) gathers all six in order, so read them there.
Publication order shows a change of mood: the early novels are angry and hungry, the books of the 1980s and 1990s widen into family sagas, and the late work is looser, funnier and more preoccupied with age. The poems run alongside all of it, from Plain Song (1965) to Dead Man’s Float (2016).
A reading path
1. Legends of the Fall (1979)
2. The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990)
3. Dalva (1988)
4. True North (2004)
5. Brown Dog (2013)
Everything Else Jim Harrison Published
Beyond the 13 key books: 25 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
3
3 books · 1981–2015
- 1981Warlocka comic novel
- 2011The Great Leaderthe first Sunderson detective novel, set in northern Michigan
- 2015The Big Seventhe second Sunderson novel
Novella collections
6
6 books · 1994–2016
- 1994Julipthree novellas
- 2000The Beast God Forgot to Inventthree novellas
- 2005The Summer He Didn’t Diethree novellas
- 2010The Farmer’s Daughterthree novellas
- 2013The River Swimmertwo novellas
- 2016The Ancient Minstrelthree novellas, his last book of fiction
Poetry
11
11 books · 1965–2021
- 1965Plain Songhis first book
- 1968Locationspoems
- 1971Outlyer and Ghazalshis first ghazals
- 1973Letters to Yesenina sequence addressed to the Russian poet
- 1986The Theory & Practice of Riverspoems
- 1996After Ikkyu and Other PoemsZen-influenced short poems
- 1998The Shape of the Journeynew and collected poems
- 2003Braided Creeka conversation in poems with Ted Kooser
- 2011Songs of Unreasonpoems
- 2016Dead Man’s Floathis last collection
- 2021Complete Poemsedited by Joseph Bednarik
Essays, food writing and other books
5
5 books · 1991–2022
- 1991Just Before Darkcollected nonfiction
- 2000The Boy Who Ran to the Woodsa children’s book
- 2001The Raw and the Cookedfood and travel essays
- 2017A Really Big Lunchfood writing, published after his death
- 2022Search for the Genuinenonfiction 1970–2015
The years · 1937–2016
Quick facts about Jim Harrison
- Known for
- Jim Harrison is known for novellas and novels about appetite, the wild and the northern American landscape, above all Legends of the Fall, and for his poetry and food writing.
- 1937
- Born in Grayling, Michigan
- 1965
- First book, the poems of Plain Song
- 1994
- Legends of the Fall filmed with Brad Pitt
- 2016
- Dies at his desk in Patagonia, Arizona
- Born
- 11 December 1937, Grayling, Michigan
- Died
- 26 March 2016, Patagonia, Arizona, aged 78
- Education
- Michigan State University, BA 1960 and MA 1964 in comparative literature
- Married
- Linda King, in 1959; two daughters
- Lived
- Northern Michigan, Livingston in Montana, and Patagonia in Arizona
- Honours
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1969); American Academy of Arts and Letters (2007)
The red mark is 1979: Legends of the Fall, the three novellas that made his name.
How Jim Harrison Writes: The Novella and the Appetite
Harrison came to fiction as a poet, and it shows in the form he favoured: the novella. Nine of his books are collections of them, and his best-known story, “Legends of the Fall”, covers half a century of a Montana family in a few dozen pages, moving by summary and sudden scene rather than slow build-up.
His people are rarely urban. “My characters aren’t from the urban dream-coasts,” he told The Paris Review in 1986: they are farmers, dam builders, pulp cutters, mixed-blood families of the Upper Peninsula and the Plains. He wrote women at length from Dalva onwards, and handled history — the Plains Indian wars, the logging of Michigan — through family journals and inheritance rather than set pieces.
Food, drink, hunting and fishing run through all of it, and through his essays for Esquire and Men’s Journal, collected in The Raw and the Cooked. He rejected the label “macho” for this: “How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I’ve been doing it since I was four.” His friend Thomas McGuane, who pushed him toward fiction, wrote about the same Montana country.
Frequently asked questions about Jim Harrison’s books
How many books has Jim Harrison written?
More than thirty published in his lifetime, and more since his death. They include twelve novels, nine collections of novellas, around twenty books of poetry including chapbooks, and several books of essays and memoir. The 13 key books on this page run from Wolf (1971) to Brown Dog (2013).
What are Jim Harrison’s books in order?
Wolf (1971), A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), Legends of the Fall (1979), Sundog (1984), Dalva (1988), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), The Road Home (1998), Off to the Side (2002), True North (2004), Returning to Earth (2007), The English Major (2008) and Brown Dog (2013). The other novels, novellas and poetry are listed further down the page.
Where should I start with Jim Harrison?
Legends of the Fall (1979). It shows him in the novella form he did best, and the title story is the one most readers already know from the 1994 film. If you would rather start with a full novel, read Dalva.
What is Jim Harrison’s most famous book?
Legends of the Fall, the 1979 collection of three novellas. Its title story, about Colonel William Ludlow and his three sons in Montana, became the 1994 film with Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn, which won the Academy Award for cinematography.
Which Jim Harrison books have been made into films?
“Revenge” (1990, with Kevin Costner) and “Legends of the Fall” (1994), both from Legends of the Fall; Farmer as Carried Away (1996); and Dalva as a television film (1996). Harrison also co-wrote the screenplay for Wolf (1994), starring Jack Nicholson.
Is Legends of the Fall a novel?
No. “Legends of the Fall” is a novella, and the 1979 book of that name collects three novellas: “Revenge”, “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” and “Legends of the Fall”.
In what order should I read the Brown Dog stories?
Read them in Brown Dog (2013), which collects all six novellas in the order they were written. The first, “Brown Dog”, appeared in The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990); the last, “He Dog”, was new to the 2013 collection.
Is Dalva part of a series?
Dalva (1988) has one sequel, The Road Home (1998), which tells the Northridge family story through five narrators. True North (2004) and Returning to Earth (2007) are a second linked pair.
Is Jim Harrison still alive?
No. He died of heart failure on 26 March 2016, aged 78, at his home in Patagonia, Arizona, while writing a poem at his desk. His wife Linda had died a few months earlier, in 2015.
Did Jim Harrison write about food?
Yes, at length. His essays on food, drink and travel for Esquire and Men’s Journal are collected in The Raw and the Cooked (2001), and more appeared after his death in A Really Big Lunch (2017). Anthony Bourdain featured him on No Reservations in 2009 and Parts Unknown in 2016.
Footnotes
- Jim Harrison — Wikipedia
- Jim Harrison — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Jim Harrison, 78; authored ‘Legends of the Fall’ — The Boston Globe, 2016
- Obituary: Jim Harrison, writer — The Scotsman, 2016
- Jim Harrison, The Art of Fiction No. 104 — The Paris Review
- Brown Dog: Novellas — New York Journal of Books
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“In a life properly lived, you’re a river.”
— Jim Harrison, “The Art of Fiction No. 104”, The Paris Review (1988)
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