As the literary world mourns the passing of poet and author Jim Harrison, many of his fans are revisiting his writing--much of which was informed by his Michigan upbringing and passion for the northern outdoors.

But if you've never picked up any of the Michigan State alumnus' more than three dozen books, or if you know him only as the guy who wrote Legends of the Fall, it can be daunting to know where to begin. So we called up a few writers and literature instructors with a deep affinity for Harrison's writing--and in one case, one of Harrison's longtime close friends--for their suggestions. With their guidance, here's our list of essential Jim Harrison reading:

Wolf: A False Memoir (1971)

The New York Times described Harrison's first work of fiction, set in a handful of American cities and the U.P.'s Huron Mountains, as a "raunchy, funny, swaggering, angry, cocksure book." Many elements of what would become Harrison's writing style and personal philosophy are present here.

"What you find [here] is the introduction of the theme that ran through Jim's work, which, as he himself stated, was a protagonist who was struggling to get himself through life but fails to do it," said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Caputo, one of Harrison's longtime friends, in a phone interview from his home in Arizona. "You also see Jim's highest talent: His ability to write about the natural world and a man's place in it."

Brown Dog (2014)

This recently released collection finally gathered together, in one book, a series of early novellas that revolved around a beloved Harrison character named Brown Dog. Rod Phillips, associate professor of humanities, culture and writing at Michigan State University, described the protagonist, a Native American man living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as getting himself into "some interesting situations dealing with the law and dealing with people from downstate."

"[Brown Dog] is both a very funny character and a bitter outsider," Phillips said. "I always think, when I read those novellas, that's Harrison's real voice: someone that holds a set of values quite different from mainstream America, who values the natural world first and foremost. The type of person that would rather spend time in the company of his bird dogs than heads of state."

Dalva (1988) and The Road Home (1998)

Dalva is the story of a middle-aged Midwestern woman who finds herself moved to search for the son she gave up for adoption; The Road Home is its sequel, weaving in other voices from Dalva's family. "Those novels were Jim's literary responses to his feminist critics who would often accuse him of being this ultra-macho, misogynist writer who could not draw a believable female character," Caputo said. "That was never true of him, but he had a tendency to foster this image of himself; I think he enjoyed being thought of of as this hard-drinking, bed-the-babe kind of guy. But Dalva and The Road Home is a beautiful portrait of a woman growing up, and her life and her death."

The Woman Lit By Fireflies (1990)

The title piece in this collection of novellas first appeared in The New Yorker in a slightly different form; its main character is a Detroit housewife who leaves her marriage by simply hopping a fence at a highway rest stop. The story is another example of Harrison's versatility as a writer when it comes to embodying voices of another gender. "Harrison is one of the few male writers who really mastered writing in a female character," Phillips said. "I think this is maybe his best collection."

True North (2004)

Harrison set this novel in the Upper Peninsula, where the protagonist struggles with coming of age, estrangement, his family's legacy, and other conflicts over the course of several decades. "This is a good one for Michigan readers," Phillips said. "It deals with the long history of Upper Michigan and various booms and busts, and the lumber industry, which established a kind of hierarchy, and the way we're still paying for that in some ways."

Plain Song (1965)

In 1965, a small Michigan press printed 1,500 copies of Harrison's first book of poems. Today a hardcover copy of the rare book fetches upwards of $300 online. Poet and writer Michael Delp, former director of the creative writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts near Traverse City, recalled the impression that collection made on him as a young man. "I can remember picking that book up in the Crawford County library and being just dumbstruck by how [Harrison] used language," Delp said. "You kind of feel like you found somebody who is writing directly to you, like he speaks a language that you just innately understand."

Legends of the Fall (1979)

The work for which Harrison is best known (due, in part, to the 1994 film adaptation starring Brad Pitt) is actually a trio of novellas. "It is absolutely his finest work," Caputo said. "The title story has such an epic sweep to it. The only other writer I know who can write a novella and evoke a feeling of it being a much larger work is Alice Monro, the Nobel Prize winner."

Letters to Yesenin (1973)

An unusual collection of poetry containing prose-poem letters Harrison addressed to Sergei Yesenin, a revered Russian poet who took his own life in 1925. "Letters to Yesenin is about our struggles with depression and suicide and such," Caputo said. "It sounds dark--and it is dark--but the beauty with which Jim writes about those things is arresting. His poetry is just breathtaking."



The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001)

Harrison is perhaps most known for his poetry and fiction, but he was a celebrated non-fiction writer as well. Case in point: This collection of essays about food and travel that includes Harrison's work for the likes of Esquire and Men's Journal. "He was able to take these mundane topics about, you know, eating a steak at a diner in Albuquerque and turn it into something way bigger and way more interesting," Phillips said.

The Theory & Practice of Rivers (1986)

Dedicated to the memory of Harrison's niece who died young, this book is almost entirely comprised of a single long poem. "Long poems have fallen out of favor with American readers in the last 50 years, but Harrison was a good guy to break the rules of form--nobody writes novellas either, and yet he mastered that better than any other American writer," Phillips said. "The Theory & Practice of Rivers is a meditation on the process of mourning. I've given it to numerous people as they were going through deaths of loved ones. It's just an amazing piece. In fact, I plan to read that this week as I think about Harrison."

Emily Bingham is the Michigan Life reporter for MLive.com, covering culture, history, travel and other aspects of life in the Great Lakes State. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook, or contact her via email at ebingham@mlive.com.

