Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard
Never Meet your Heroes
I was sitting poolside in Arizona in March 2016, reading Jim Harrison’s The Ancient Minstrel, when I learned he had died the night before just a few hours south near the Mexican border. He’d been writing poetry in his final moments, his longhand becoming tiny and nearly illegible at the bottom of the page as the heart attack came on. I read the final pages slowly, knowing that though Harrison was one of the more prolific writers of his generation, his words were now finite.
Eight years later, writer and professor Todd Goddard has finished the first and definitive biography of Harrison’s wild and complex life. Well-written and thoroughly researched, with nary a detail missed, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life (Blackstone, November 2025) doesn’t gloss over time periods or delve into abstraction. It documents, in detail, the evolution of a dreamy 17-year-old Michigan farm kid who loved books to the 78-year-old legend who would write nearly 40 of them.
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