According to NPR, he's been compared to Faulkner and Hemingway.


https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...=us&authuser=0
(multiple obits)


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/ar...ies-at-78.html

First paragraphs:

Jim Harrison, whose lust for life -- and sometimes just plain lust -- roared into print in a vast, celebrated body of fiction, poetry and essays that with ardent abandon explored the natural world, the life of the mind and the pleasures of the flesh, died on Saturday at his home in Patagonia, Ariz. He was 78.

His death was confirmed by his publisher, Grove Atlantic, which said the cause had not been determined.

A native of Michigan, Mr. Harrison lived most recently during the summers in the wild countryside near Livingston, Mont., where he enthusiastically shot the rattlesnakes that colonized his yard, and during the winters in Patagonia, where he enthusiastically shot all kinds of things.

In both places, far from the self-regarding literary soirees of New York, for which he had little but contempt, and the lucre of Hollywood, where he had done time as a dazzlingly dissolute if not altogether successful screenwriter, he could engage in the essential, monosyllabic pursuits that defined the borders of his life: to walk, drive, hunt, fish, cook, drink, smoke, write.

The result was prodigious: 21 volumes of fiction, including "Legends of the Fall" (1979), a collection of three novellas whose title piece, about a Montana family ravaged by World War I, became a 1994 film starring Brad Pitt; 14 books of poetry; two books of essays; a memoir, and a children's book.

His most recent book of fiction, "The Ancient Minstrel," was published this month. A book of poetry, "Dead Man's Float," was published this year.

In Mr. Harrison's fiction, especially, lay some of the most vivid, violent and evocative writing of its day -- work that in the estimation of many critics captured the resonant, almost mythic soul of 20th-century rural America...

(and, later on)

....His food writing, much of which first appeared in Esquire, was collected in his 2001 book, "The Raw and the Cooked," whose title invokes the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's volume of that name. Mr. Lévi-Strauss's book is about myth and ritual. Mr. Harrison's is about rituals that include his flying to France for the sole purpose of having lunch -- a lunch that spanned 11 hours, 37 courses and 19 wines...


Lenona.