'Legends of the Fall' author Jim Harrison dead at 78

'Legends of the Fall' author Jim Harrison dead at 78

'Legends of the Fall' author Jim Harrison dead at 78, Jim Harrison, the fiction writer, poet, outdoorsman and reveler who wrote with abrupt amore for the country's mural and rural activity and enjoyed boilerplate success in average age with his actual adventure "Legends of the Fall," has died at age 78.

Spokeswoman Deb Seager of Grove Atlantic, Harrison's publisher, told The Associated Press that Harrison died Saturday at his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Seager did not apperceive the could cause of death. Harrison's wife of added than 50 years, Linda King Harrison, died endure fall.

The able and abounding columnist completed added than 30 books, a lot of afresh the novella accumulating "The Ancient Minstrel," and was admired worldwide. Sometimes likened to Ernest Hemingway for the ambit and kinds of his interests, he was a hunter and fisherman who savored his time in a berth abreast his Michigan hometown, a drinker and Hollywood scriptwriter who was abutting accompany with Jack Nicholson and came to apperceive Sean Connery, Orson Welles and Warren Beatty a part of others. He was a sports biographer and a man of amazing appetence who already able off a 37-course lunch, a adventurer and teller of tales, a lot of abundantly "Legends of the Fall."

"His articulation came from the American heartland and his abysmal and constant adulation of the American mural runs through his amazing physique of work," Grove Atlantic administrator and CEO Morgan Entrekin said in account Sunday.

Published in 1979, "Legends of the Fall" was a accumulating of three novellas that featured the appellation adventure about Montana agriculturist Col. William Ludlow and his three sons of acutely allegory personalities and values, the anecdotal extending from afore World War I to the mid-20th century, from San Francisco to Singapore.

"Late in October 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana to Calgary, Alberta to admit in the Abundant War," reads Harrison's acclaimed aperture sentence, which columnist Vance Bourjaily would acclaim for establishing "both the articulation and address of the ballsy storyteller, who deals in abundant vistas and all-inclusive distances."

The book was a best-seller, and Harrison formed on the Software for an Oscar-nominated 1994 blur of the aforementioned name starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn. Harrison's cine credits aswell included "Revenge," starring Kevin Costner, and the Nicholson blur "Wolf." But he would allegorize the capricious and assumption wracking action to getting trapped in a "shuddering elevator" and reminded himself of his bordering cachet by block a appraisal by a Hollywood executive, "You're just a writer," on a section of cardboard and taping it aloft his desk.

Harrison could accept been a superb appearance actor, a bearded, able-bodied man with a agee larboard eye and a smoker's abrade who confided that if out in accessible with Nicholson he was sometimes mistaken for the actor's bodyguard. Erudite abundant to address reviews for The New York Times and to adduce Wallace Stevens from memory, he aswell had a able affection for concrete activity and a history of autograph belief for and about men.

"My characters aren't from the burghal dream-coasts," he told The Paris Review in 1986. "A man is not a foreman on a dam activity because he wants to be macho. That's his job, a job he's acquired into.

"How is it blowing that I like to coursing and fish? I've been accomplishing it aback I was four."

Harrison had displayed abundant talents afore the accepted accessible bent on to him. He was an able artist and sports announcer and a fiction biographer with a able feel for accessible spaces and the cull and after-effects of history. He set abounding works in the rural arctic of his built-in Michigan, including the detective novels "The Abundant Leader" and "The Big Seven," and acclimated Nebraska as the accomplishments for one of his a lot of acclaimed works, "Dalva."

His added books included a aggregate of novellas, "The River Swimmer"; the balladry collections "Songs of Unreason" and "Returning to Earth"; and a account about food, "The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand." He was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.

Harrison affiliated Linda King in 1959 and had two daughters.

The grandson of farmers, and son of an agronomical addendum agent, Harrison grew up in baby Michigan towns — Grayling, Reed City, Haslett — area he developed a adulation of books and a age-old band with the outdoors, "bone- and marrow-deep." He would accessory his adolescence with simple pleasures and advancing loss, a accepted anxious for simpler times and the concrete affliction of his dark larboard eye, afflicted at age 7 if a adjacency babe awash a canteen in his face.

In the 1950s and '60s, he drifted amid studies at Michigan State University and the "Beat" arena in Boston, area he met Jack Kerouac, and New York City, area he accomplished briefly afore abiding to rural Michigan. In 1965, he debuted as a artist with "Plain Song."

Life as an outdoorsman aback fabricated him a novelist. In the backward 1960s, he slipped off a coffer forth the Manistee River in Michigan, afflicted his back, accomplished into a semi-coma and for some two years was affected to abrasion a corset. His abutting acquaintance Tom McGuane appropriate he try a feature plan of fiction aback Harrison "could no best do annihilation to abstain it." (Through McGuane, he would aswell accommodated Nicholson, if Harrison visited the set of "The Missouri Breaks," a 1976 cine accounting by McGuane).

Harrison's aboriginal novel, "Wolf: A Fake Memoir," came out in 1971 and he followed two years after with a plan of fiction about the ecology, "A Good Day to Die." But he was devastated by the bartering abortion of his atypical "Farmer" and was so bankrupt he recalled, he couldn't pay his taxes and couldn't ample out a scholarship anatomy for his babe because he was appropriate to cover annal from the IRS.

His turnaround complex a accurate Hollywood twist. Harrison was visiting his in-laws' home if he came aloft the journals of his wife's great-grandfather, a mining architect called William Ludlow, and was aggressive to address a story. The achievement of what became "Legends of the Fall" was fabricated accessible by a $15,000 accommodation from Nicholson.

"And now the one-eyed goofy, the black-sheep artist ... has aback addled it rich," Harrison after wrote of his mid-life success. "After the aboriginal abounding year of this acquaintance I was sitting on the balustrade of our afresh adapted farmhouse, amateur the estimated time and amount and a thoroughly demanding process, account the Detroit Free Press and acquainted that I had fabricated added money in the endure year than the President of Accepted Motors, Harlow Curtis.

"I idly hoped he was blessed in his work."

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