Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer's Life

Devouring Time is the definitive biography of Jim Harrison--one of America's most beloved writers--and a penetrating deep dive into the life of the talent behind Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and True North.

Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was widely considered one of the finest voices of his generation. His twenty-one books of fiction and fourteen books of poetry influenced a generation of writers. Harrison helped to shape the course of contemporary American literature, revitalizing in particular the novella form, of which he was a recognized master.

Harrison's literary achievements were matched only by the literary persona that he cultivated during a fecund time in American letters and in the company of a remarkable cohort of friends, writers, actors, and artists, including Thomas McGuane, Peter Matthiessen, Jimmy Buffett, and Jack Nicholson. His articles for such magazines as Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Esquire, and Outside in the 1970s won him a loyal readership who reveled in his high spirits and prodigious appetites.

For all his notoriety as a writer of prose, however, poetry remained his first and longest-abiding love. He cherished his geographic remoteness from what he called the "dream coasts" of New York City and Los Angeles, preferring to hunt, fish, and drink in the backwoods bars of Michigan, Arizona, and Montana.

Based on more than one hundred original interviews and drawing upon Harrison's collected papers, Devouring Time is the first and only literary biography of this beloved author, whose playful, irreverent, and spiritual work continues to find and delight new readers.

Kevin Maurer is a journalist who has spent more than two decades covering the special operations community. He co-authored the New York Times bestselling No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden. He is the author of more than a dozen other books and has covered war and national security for The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and other publications. Maurer has embedded with Special Forces and reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, and Africa.