"My characters aren't from the urban dream-coasts," he told The Paris Review in 1986. "A man is not a foreman on a dam project because he wants to be macho. That's his job, a job he's evolved into.

"How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I've been doing it since I was four."

Harrison had displayed numerous talents before the general public caught on to him. He was an accomplished poet and sports journalist and a fiction writer with a strong feel for open spaces and the pull and consequences of history. He set many works in the rural north of his native Michigan, including the detective novels "The Great Leader" and "The Big Seven," and used Nebraska as the backdrop for one of his most acclaimed works, "Dalva."

His other books included a volume of novellas, "The River Swimmer"; the poetry collections "Songs of Unreason" and "Returning to Earth"; and a memoir about food, "The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand." He was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.

Harrison married Linda King in 1959 and had two daughters.