Writer/outdoorsman Jim Harrison dies age 78

In the waning years of his life, Jim Harrison split his time between the countryside near Livingston, Mont., and small-town Patagonia, Ariz. The prolific poet and novelist, who famously sported a luscious beard and mustache that many likened to that of Pancho Villa, spent his days hunting, cooking and writing to the end.

Harrison died March 26 at his home in Patagonia, his publisher, Grove Atlantic, confirmed to the Associated Press. He was 78.

“Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him,” a Sunday Times of London reviewer once said, an assessment that would be repeated over and over — on book jackets and by his legion of admirers.

The author of more than 30 books, Harrison was a lifelong outdoorsman who gained wide renown after the publication, in his middle age, of his best-selling 1979 novella, “Legends of the Fall.” The story, which follows the journey of three brothers from Montana to Alberta to fight in the Canadian forces before the Americans’ entry into World War I, cemented the kind of storytelling for which Harrison was known: moral, dark and resplendent with descriptions of the natural world.

“His voice came from the American heartland and his deep and abiding love of the American landscape runs through his extraordinary body of work,” Grove Atlantic chief executive Morgan Entrekin said in a statement to the AP.