The MeatEater Podcast

Ep. 802: The Life and Death of Jim Harrison
Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Todd Goddard, author of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life
Released: December 8, 2025

Overview

In this episode, Steven Rinella hosts Todd Goddard, literary professor and author of a new biography of Jim Harrison, "Devouring Time." The discussion dives deep into the iconic and contradictory life of Harrison—the legendary novelist, poet, essayist, outdoorsman, environmentalist, and complicated human. Harrison’s writing is cherished by hunters and anglers, but his literary reputation far transcends any genre: he wrote about hunting, fishing, food, friendship, and the hardships and poetry of living. Goddard and Rinella explore Harrison's origins, his literary output, the impact of tragedy and trauma on his work, his complicated relationships, and his enduring influence on American—and particularly outdoors—literature.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Was Jim Harrison?

• Harrison’s Renown & Output

  • Known best for Legends of the Fall, but that’s “just barely scratching the surface.” (03:29)
  • Wrote 12 novels, 9 collections of novellas, 18 books of poetry, essay collections, children’s book. “An outrageously... outrageous amount of output.” – Todd Goddard [04:49]
  • Not just an “outdoor” writer: explored food, environmentalism, flawed masculinity (“a technically brilliant writer. One of the great writers who’s colored by the outdoors, the worlds of hunting and fishing. Very complex, kind of frustrating person, full of flaws...” – Rinella [05:10])

• Jim Harrison’s Works

  • “Wolf,” “Brown Dog,” “Just Before Dark” (essay collection), “The Road Home,” “Dalva,” etc.
  • “Wolf is... a false memoir... trying to catch a glimpse of a wolf in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.” – Rinella [04:22]
  • “Just Before Dark... beautiful, brilliant hunting and fishing combined with some of the most obnoxious and arrogant food writing.” – Rinella [03:44]

2. Harrison’s Early Life & Places

• Born 1937 in Grayling, MI, grew up in Reed City/Hazlett. Settled in Lake Leelanau, then moved to Paradise Valley, Montana around 2000, and wintered in Patagonia, AZ. Spent significant time in Key West, FL. Maintained a cabin in the Upper Peninsula (Grand Marais area). [09:20-10:15]
• “Those are Jim’s main places.” – Todd Goddard [10:12]
• Like Hemingway: “Claimed by all these different geographic locales” – Goddard [13:01]
• “Key West was yet another place that held some of the Harrison mystique.” – Rinella [13:13]

3. Harrison's Relationship to Hunting, Fishing, and the Out-of-Doors

• Not a big game hunter:
  • “He loved to eat big game, but he wasn’t a big game hunter. He... passed the gun to a friend rather than shoot an antelope,” because “he couldn’t handle killing mammals; their parts looked too much like humans.” – Goddard [08:45-11:13]
• Bird hunting (“hunted a ton of quail in Patagonia”) and fly-fishing were his true passions.
• “He was a fly snob, but he hated snobs. One of his many contradictions.” – Rinella [11:28]
• He was simultaneously an astute observer of nature and frustrated with “hook and bullet” writers who only cared about how to kill animals, not to understand them. “He was infuriated by that.” – Rinella [54:02]

4. Origins, Family, and Literary Ascent

• Came from a reading, but not literary, family; father was an agricultural agent graduating from MSU, instilled land ethic. [15:47-16:41]
• “They didn’t know writers. We didn’t know anyone who knew any writers.” – Goddard [16:58]
• Lost vision in one eye in childhood (a “rosebud”/defining trauma, see below).

Memorable quote:
Jim Harrison is “a country boy who was touched. Touched by genius.” — Tom McGuane, via Todd Goddard [19:02]

• Harrison’s appeal in France: “The French associate Jim with wilderness... someone who's writing about the landscape and history of northern Michigan... that's part of his appeal.” – Goddard [20:01]

5. Enduring Traumas and Their Impact

• Eye Injury at Seven: Disfigured by broken glass, lost vision in one eye. “He had a googly eye... It haunted him, dude. It became him.” – Rinella [29:12]

  • This event produced a lifelong sense of outsiderhood and contributed to his affinity for the natural world:
  • “There in the woods, he wasn’t judged. He could observe creatures... became sort of the beginning of his mythology.” – Goddard [33:21-34:29]
  • Impact on self-perception: “He saw something a lot worse than what was there.” – Rinella [33:49]
  • Humor: “In one bird hunting essay, he talks about the moment it occurred to him... he could just use a monocular instead of binoculars.” [36:08]

• Father and Sister’s Death in Car Accident:

  • Harrison narrowly missed being with them; wracked by survivor’s guilt. Their deaths catalyzed his devotion to writing: “No Plan B for Jim.” “I found a new voice. The truth is always new wine.” – Goddard [41:56-43:19]
  • “That story permeates everything he wrote after that and defined the rest of his life.” – Goddard [43:18]

6. On Friendship and Literary Community

• Harrison and Tom McGuane forged a five-decade friendship. “They wrote two letters a week for decades... and really worked at building friendships.” – Goddard [62:45]
• Their circle included writers, musicians (Jimmy Buffett), artists (Russell Chatham), bird hunters, and fishermen.
• “Jim cultivated not just male friends, but female friends too.” – Goddard [62:02]
• Collaborations: Covers of Harrison’s books often featured Russell Chatham’s paintings.
  • “They became inextricably linked. A lot of people picked up a Harrison book because of the cover for the first time.” – Goddard [69:45]
• Documentary and Key West era: discussed the film Tarpon and the fishing/creative scenes of the era [70:17-71:31]

7. Major Themes in Harrison’s Work

• Characters’ deep respect for the natural world; environmental awareness is core.
  • “I don’t think he ever had a main character that didn’t respect nature.” – Rinella [56:01]
• Humor and sadness interwoven: “Not just dark and troubled... had an unbelievable store of humor and exuberance for life.” – Goddard [79:04]
• Friendship as a central value: “Masculine guys, outdoor guys, who... were communal people.” – Goddard [62:02]
• Contradictions of wealth, class, masculinity: Harrison “prides people with work ethics; his good characters work hard,” yet later in life, he’s “in the fishbowl” of privilege and wealth. (“It was a conflict and a struggle for him.” – Goddard [57:41])
• Environmental advocacy: “Lifelong, unapologetic environmentalist... a clean air, clean water, wildlife guy through and through.” – Rinella [103:33]

8. Complicated Personal Life

• Infidelities & Treatment of His Wife

  • Harrison routinely humiliated his wife through affairs and philandering, even in his writing.
  • “There’s just no way I’m gonna humiliate my wife... I want to be like, oh, he was great, but I’m always like, yeah, but what was that all about?” – Rinella [83:06]
  • Goddard: “There’s no excuse for humiliation... She was incredibly smart, and she knew very early on how Jim was going to conduct his life... She accepted, if not explicitly, then tacitly, the terms of that relationship...” [85:18-86:01]
  • Discussion of open relationships and their challenges, referencing Tom McGuane’s observations [86:15-87:43]

• Depression and Suicidal Ideation

  • Harrison struggled with deep bouts of depression especially after the deaths in his family; came “extremely close” to suicide in his thirties. Poetry sometimes pulled him through [77:40-79:04].
  • “Despite these epic depressions, he had this unbelievable store of humor...” – Goddard [79:04]

9. Harrison’s Work Habits, Style, and Literary Place

• Never abandoned writing poetry, considered it “the true bones of his life.”
• “He was finishing poems the day he died... a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.” – Goddard [82:00]
• Not “mechanically inclined”; “he would sometimes lament that he had no mechanical capabilities.” – Rinella [81:07-81:14]
• Unique literary voice: rooted in place and raw experience, but deeply read and highly crafted.
• Often compared to Hemingway, but “writes extremely, very differently than Hemingway... love-hate relationship with Hemingway, haunted and trying to distance himself.” – Goddard [22:01-24:21]

10. Legacy and Biography

• The first major biography of Harrison: Todd Goddard spent “over a hundred interviews, six to seven years” on the book, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life [97:34-98:10].
• “No one’s done a full biography before.” – Rinella [98:03]
• Harrison died in 2016, five months after his wife Linda. “He faded in her absence.” – Goddard [96:01]
• Ongoing influence: “Of the writers that swerve in and out of the worlds of hunting and fishing and nature, I think he’s the most celebrated. I don’t think anybody comes close.” – Rinella [101:35]
• “Even novellas, which is... a little too ADHD for a novel—try a novella. Harrison mastered that form.” [101:55-102:02]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On discovering Harrison:
  “He hooked me from the start. Then I just did a deep dive in Harrison... tried to teach him in grad school, and just kept rereading ’til I could write this book.” – Todd Goddard [07:18]

• On being an outsider:
  “Because of his disfigurement, he felt he was always off to the side now, seeing things differently, literally, figuratively... not part of the crowd, but observing part of the crowd.” – Goddard [34:29]

• On his complexity:
  “He was a little bit of a fly fishing snob, but man, he hated arrogance. For an arrogant guy, he couldn’t stand arrogance in other people.” – Todd Goddard [11:53]

• On literary ambition and background:
  “How does this dude... known and celebrated in France, from some redneck ass town north of us?” – Rinella [15:24]

• On humility and success:
  “He feared that he had lost track of who he once was... feeding at the bourgeois trough.” – Goddard [59:05]

• On death and writing:
  “He died writing a poem. He was sitting at his desk with the poem in front of him and a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray when he died.” – Goddard [81:31]

• On Harrison’s place in the canon:
  “He’s to me what Hemingway was to him.” – Rinella [102:42]

• On environmentalism:
  “He was a lifelong unapologetic environmentalist. He didn’t care if that was in fashion or out of fashion. That dude was an environmentalist.” – Rinella [103:33]

Segment Timestamps (Selected)

• Harrison’s Literary Output & Reputation: [03:18]–[06:08]
• Hunting/Fishing, Place, and Geographic Roots: [09:15]–[14:02]
• Formative traumas (Eye injury, Family deaths): [29:12]–[43:18]
• Friendship with Tom McGuane, Literary Circles: [43:19]–[47:52], [62:00]–[67:38]
• His Contradictions (Snobbery, Wealth, Masculinity): [57:03]–[61:39]
• Infidelity and Marriage: [82:30]–[89:36]
• Harrison’s Death and Legacy: [94:00]–[104:42]

Final Thoughts

Steven Rinella and Todd Goddard offer a rich and unvarnished look at Jim Harrison’s life—in all its contradictions, brilliance, and impact. The episode works both as a celebration and an honest interrogation of Harrison’s legacy, especially the complex, sometimes less savory aspects of his personal life, and his tremendous gifts as a writer and observer of the natural world. The conversation is full of affection, insight, wry humor, and the kind of critical engagement that Harrison himself might have appreciated.

Recommended Reading:

• Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard
• Harrison’s own works, especially Wolf, Brown Dog, Just Before Dark, Dalva, Legends of the Fall

For further listening/viewing:

• Tarpon (1970s fishing documentary with Harrison, McGuane, Russell Chatham, and others)
• Rivers of a Lost Coast (documentary about NorCal steelhead fishing and Russell Chatham)

[End of Summary]