Devouring Time
Jim Harrison, a Writer's Life
Drawing on intimate gossip and rigorous critical scholarship, Todd Goddard’s Devouring Time is the first full-scale biography of Jim Harrison, the mold-breaking and large-living man of letters who transformed the literary landscape of his time.
Harrison, as the book outlines, cut an unusual figure in the world of twentieth-century American literature. A lifelong skeptic of the MFA pipeline through which so many of his peers made their writing careers, Harrison sought and achieved a far wider audience for his work than most literary writers of his time could expect. Although Harrison considered himself a poet above all else, Devouring Time details his unorthodox route to literary stardom, tracing his early successes with sports journals and food columns and his explosive career as a Hollywood screenwriter. The book collects countless interviews and anecdotes to describe how, while moving through these disparate literary circles, Harrison crafted a mythologized self-image for himself as an omnivorous, hard-partying Renaissance man, though also bristling against disappointments with his literary legacy.
Exhaustive in every way that matters, the book reveals the often frustrating circularity of Harrison’s personal habits. After establishing his rise to prominence, it follows its subject from one boozy fishing retreat, cocaine-fueled “research” trip, and culinary gorge-fest to another. Such excursions are mapped onto larger thematic throughlines that connect, for example, Harrison’s excesses with his creative processes and his lifelong apprehension about being locked out of coastal literary establishments. The text also achieves a rare level of intimacy from its masterful incorporation of Harrison’s sometimes jovial, often agonized, letters to writers including Denise Levertov and Thomas McGuane, who were paramount to his artistic development.
Devouring Time is a meticulous, loving biography of one of the twentieth century’s most exuberant literary personalities.
Reviewed by
Isaac Randel
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
