The Beast God Forgot to Invent

An unforgettable collection of novellas from the author of Legends of the Fall explores the line between civilization and the "wild men."

Jim Harrison is an American master. The Beast God Forgot to Invent offers stories of culture and wildness, of men and beasts and where they overlap. A wealthy man retired to the Michigan woods narrates the tale of a younger man decivilized by brain damage. A Michigan Indian wanders Los Angeles, hobnobbing with starlets and screenwriters while he tracks an ersatz Native-American activist who stole his bearskin. An aging alpha canine, the author of three dozen throwaway biographies, eats dinner with the ex-wife of his overheated youth, and must confront the man he used to be.

"Harrison's intricate symbolism and scathing observations of urban foibles, his sly humor and vibrant language remind readers that he is one of our most talented chroniclers of the masculine psyche, intellectual or not." —Publishers Weekly

Jim Harrison was born in 1937, in Grayling, Michigan. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and The New York Times.

Harrison was also the author of over thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including seven volumes of novellas, Legends of the Fall (1979), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), Julip (1994), The Beast God Forgot to Invent (2000), The Summer He Didn’t Die (2005), The Farmer’s Daughter (2010), and The River Swimmer (2013); eleven novels, Wolf (1971), A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), Warlock (1981), Sundog (1984), Dalva (1988), The Road Home (1998), True North (2004), Returning to Earth (2007), The English Major (2008), and The Great Leader (2011); thirteen collections of poetry, including most recently Songs of Unreason (2011), In Search of Small Gods (2009), and Saving Daylight (2006); and three works of nonfiction, the memoir Off to the Side (2001) and the collections Just Before Dark (1991) and The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001).

The winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters (2007) and was named Officier des Arts et Lettres (2012) by the French Ministry of Culture for his “significant contribution to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance.” His work has been published in twenty-seven languages.

Harrison lived in Montana and Arizona before his death in 2016 at the age of seventy-eight.