Writer Jim Harrison's stories "tend to be powered by myth," Stuart Schoffman writes in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. "Underneath, the ingredients are staple: nature, adultery, violence." With this mix of ingredients, Harrison has created "a holy American mythology," Jerome Klinkowitz asserts. In a Chicago Sun-Times review of Legends of the Fall, Harrison's widely acclaimed collection of novellas brought to the screen in 1995, Klinkowitz finds that "so much of American legend is packed into these brief pages that Jim Harrison must be admired as an almost sacred writer."

Before 1979, the year when the publication of Legends of the Fall brought him great commercial success, Harrison "had averaged a scanty $10,000 a year writing award-winning . . . poetry (five volumes) and three other novels which had never quite taken off," Gordon Chaplin notes in the Washington Post. "For years he wrote beautiful poems that everyone said were 'beautiful poems' and made no money," Kathleen Stocking states in the Detroit News Magazine. "Surprise. Jim Harrison has become rich and famous."

Legends of the Fall reveals Harrison "at the height of his powers," Raymond Carver writes in the Washington Post Book World. According to Carver, the novella "The Man Who Gave up His Name" is an "extraordinary piece of writing covering what might seem all-too-familiar territory: a change in life for a man in his early 40s. But I think this novella can stand with the best examples the form has to offer—those by Conrad, Chekhov, Mann, James, Melville, Lawrence, Isak Dinesen." "I can't begin to do justice to the nuances of character and honest complexities of plot in this work," Carver continues. "The writing is precise and careful—and sings withal." Legends of the Fall "is a good Harrison sampler," Klinkowitz writes, "three short novels about revenge, redemption, and sorrow, all primal acts of strong men in profile against an even more demanding world."

Legends of the Fall is inhabited by "men to whom life reveals itself in primitive ways, through primitive acts of will," an Atlantic reviewer declares. "These violent, compelling novellas startled, angered, and disturbed me," Garrett Epps comments in the Washington Post Book World. "They also fascinated me, kept me thinking afterwards. They are, beyond question, the work of a gifted and accomplished writer. They tell of men who seek vengeance on their enemies . . . , [men for whom] vengeance brings a kind of religious ecstasy." Chaplin remarks that "an almost mystical faith and fascination in the efficacy of violence as nature's own solution" underlies the three novellas. And in Nation, Keith Opdahl says that Legends of the Fall is "full of silent men and lovely women who desire to be ravaged. The bad guys are nightmare figures with names like 'Slats' who just don't listen to reason. You have to zap them hard."

Because of his harsh, often violent subject matter and his one-dimensional portrayals of female characters—the latter a criticism that would also haunt the film version of his book—Harrison has been criticized, as Jonathan Yardley writes in the New York Times Book Review, for being "extravagantly free-male, male animal" in his fiction. Epps believes that Legends of the Fall "is not for everyone. Harrison writes about—and, I think, almost completely for—men." "In fact," Epps continues, "it seems fair to say that Legends of the Fall is a collection of fairy tales for men. That is not to disparage its craft, power or worth—such tales have always been a sophisticated form of literature, important for their exemplary role in teaching people how to overcome evil and enjoy goodness," but "because these men are everything most men wish to be, their stories have a terrible power. They speak to the reader's deepest hopes and fears about himself." Epps feels that in the novellas Harrison "is holding up a view of manhood—self-sufficient, violent, strong, antisocial—that seems to be losing currency in this country. I happen to think that the passing of these values is, on the whole, a good thing."

The title novella of Legends of the Fall tells the story of Tristan, a Montana farmer who, along with his two brothers, enlists to fight in World War I. When his gentle younger brother is killed in the war, Tristan goes mad, scalping every German he can capture, and is locked away. In the National Review, Laurie Prothro says of Tristan: "His obsessive fury and quest for vengeance cause him to inflict terrible agonies on others, and on himself. He escapes the hospital to spend his life in tortured search of the reason why there is no fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. We share his limitless grief when he realizes that there is no way to even the score with the world." "Tristan's is a shatteringly tragic story," Prothro concludes. "Harrison tells it brilliantly." "Harrison takes a terrible pleasure in himself as a moral creature," James Whitehead concludes in the Saturday Review. "Man and beast in the rounds of their dying—Harrison can tolerate it. He can celebrate it." As Harrison told Stocking, "You can't be a writer unless you are willing to face up to every unpleasant aspect of the human experience." "It is a matter of 'not withholding the evidence,"' Stocking adds, "of telling the truth about life."

Despite his praise for Harrison's "extraordinary talent," Yardley feels that Harrison "manufactures a fraternity of he-men who use women in the fashion of town pumps and romanticize about an ecologically balanced utopia where, fishing pole in hand and Rover by his side, a man can be a man—while the rest of the world staggers on in its lamentable, but inescapably real, way." Peter S. Prescott of Newsweek believes that Harrison's fiction "celebrates a fantasy of masculine self-sufficiency" in which "a woman is a smooth-skinned primate who, by virtue of her domesticity and enervating sexuality, is incapable of understanding a man's need to blaze his solitary path in a senseless world. A woman is something a man must leave behind, preferably pregnant, with the suggestion that he may return in a year or two; the woman, of course, waits." "Has Harrison seen too many gangster movies, too many Westerns, too much TV?," Opdahl asks. "He seems to believe all this," Opdahl continues, "though I would guess that he is either doing movie scenarios, attempting to tap into the great American Dream Machine, . . . or has trained himself as a poet to be too honest, too direct to soften these American fantasies."

In the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt calls Harrison's first full-length novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, "a poet's novel, adding up to nothing but its boisterous and eloquent self." H. L. Van Brunt, writing in the Saturday Review, asserts that Harrison and other poets-turned-novelists have "a conspicuous advantage. For while they may have to learn a new and very different discipline, they came to their task equipped with copious imagination and, of course, a trained command of the language. . . . Humor, irony and, above all, energy animate Harrison's prose."

The main character of Wolf is Swanson, "a one-man pioneer movement looking for a new country," Van Brunt writes. A bitter and restless thirty-three-year-old drifter, Swanson abandons the decadence of urban life for the renewing atmosphere of the northern Michigan woods. According to Yardley, Swanson is "a loner, an anachronism, a wolf." During his stay in the forest, Swanson becomes obsessed with spotting a wolf, a kindred spirit. He says that "there are only three or four hundred native wolves left in the United States. I felt that if I could see one all my luck would change." Swanson's quest for the wolf, Van Brunt comments, "may be seen as a symbolic pursuit of lost wildness and freedom. . . . Swanson bristles into being—a man mean in the fashion of a child or an animal, a creature who snarls and spits at would-be tamers who hold out the meat of mediocrity and uniformity as he struggles to keep open all the possibilities his free-wheeling youth once afforded." Despite his longing for freedom, Swanson doesn't remain in the forest for long; "he is bitten by insects, he gets lost, he worries about snakes, and he desperately misses liquor and cigarettes," Lehmann-Haupt observes. "Swanson is not very wolflike," Joyce Carol Oates points out in the Partisan Review. "He is lost in the wilderness, and, we assume, he has always been lost; his life is as shapeless as nature itself." As Swanson says in the book: "Driving out of the woods I felt a new and curious calm but doubted it would last. . . . When I reached the main road I would stop at a gas station and make a reservation at a hotel in Ishpeming and when I got there I knew I would shower and go down to the bar and drink myself into the comatose state I knew I deserved." Swanson's story, Yardley concludes, "sharply portray[s] the conflict between the urge to live—fully, meaningfully, exuberantly—and the circumstances we have created for life." "The effect of the whole," Lehmann-Haupt states, "is touching and slightly fearsome."

Two decades later, Harrison would revisit the idea of werewolves in his screenplay for the 1994 film Wolf. Inspired by the same thoughts of the possibilities of the existence of werewolves that had inspired his novel of the same name, Harrison's screenplay wears two coats: that of a female lead, played by actress Michelle Pfeiffer, and his city-slicker-gone-country in actor Jack Nicolson's book-editor-turned wolf. Beginning on the requisite dark and stormy night, Nicolson runs down a wolf with his car; approaching the animal, he is bitten. In the weeks that follow, the book editor begins to undergo both physical and mental changes, causing him to be more aggressive on the job. A trip to his boss's house brings the attractive boss's daughter—Pfeiffer's character—into his sights, and he makes a play for her, despite their difference in age.

Despite the top-notch technical support for the film, critical response has been tepid. Commenting on the screenplay, Variety contributor Todd McCarthy notes that Harrison's script "tries hard to make this shaggy story play plausibly as a modern piece, but still can't avoid such tired devices as full moon fever and the Middle European expert who explains lycanthropy to [Nicolson's character.]" Commenting negatively on the film, Stanley Kauffman notes in New Republic that "Elaine May . . . rewrote the screenplay [by Harrison and Wesley Strick], uncredited. Wise woman."

A Choice critic describes Harrison's 1973 work, A Good Day to Die, as "a fine novel," a "black comedy of three modern misfits." This tale of disaffected youth, of two men and a woman who travel west to dynamite a government dam, is "a poet's book," according to William Crawford Woods. "Its metaphors are sharp as jagged bone. Its long cadences plead to be read aloud. Its language as a whole is a half-mad harvest of technical vocabularies." Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Woods is critical of the novel's development but believes that Harrison is "the real thing, and his work is absolutely genuine. . . . [He] has several gifts it would be hard to overpraise. Bright, dizzying language aside, he can swiftly characterize certain rural and urban types with a precision close to paradigm." In a New York Times review, Lehmann-Haupt commends Harrison's "jagged and cutting" perceptions in this "remarkably well-plotted story," but hopes that Harrison will learn to "more skillfully match [his] themes to the underlying myths they rely on."

Harrison's third novel, Farmer, is the story of Joseph, a middle-aged schoolteacher in rural Michigan who finds himself torn between two women—his steady girlfriend Rosealee and a racy high school senior. "Joseph . . . has been planning for several years to marry his fellow teacher Rosealee," Raymond Sokolov observes in Newsweek. "Stolidly and regularly, on appointed days of the week, they sleep together in the dark. Sometime soon, they will wed and Joseph will farm her acreage. It is a joyless plan. Joseph, meanwhile, dreams of the ocean, of breaking out of the landlocked world." As a Booklist reviewer notes, Joseph's young lover Catherine offers "a more tantalizing yet not clearly marked trail." "She comes from the outside world that Joseph craves," Sokolov points out. "Harrison cannily fractures his story and reveals each treasured facet only gradually . . . [to form] an artfully disjointed meditation on a complicated person." Sokolov finds that Harrison's patient unraveling of his main character succeeds in putting "the reader inside Joseph's head." "Harrison gives us a man, an environment, an attitude," Webster Schott writes. "The man is a wanter, usually fondling a dream, often on the edge of failure, endowed with an ability to survive. The environment is Michigan bursting. The attitude is stoic." In the New York Times Book Review, Schott concludes that Harrison "writes beautifully. He sees life going on and on, its meaning in its pattern, its outcome uncertain except in ending. He moves us rather than overwhelms us. He creates an art small except in its grace."

"What a joy it is to discover Jim Harrison," Schoffman declares in a review of Warlock, Harrison's fourth novel. Schoffman says that Harrison "has written a rich and sparkling novel about a tired theme: the mid-life angst of the American male." This account of the adventures of Johnny "Warlock" Lundgren, an unemployed executive who dabbles in detective work, is laced with "tender irony, a touch of absurdity," Schoffman remarks. "Man in mid-stream, seeking transformation, will realize that the river moves, not he," Schoffman observes, "but the dream of change is the vital counterweight to the omnipresent dream of death. Between clenched teeth, in Legends of the Fall, in the Faulknerian reveries of Farmer and now in Warlock's baying to [his beautiful wife], goddess of the Michigan moon, Harrison proves himself master of American theme and style." In the Times Literary Supplement, T. O. Treadwell says that "Warlock is a comic novel which rests on the premise that beneath the slick and sophisticated surface of American life the old nature gods still exercise their capricious power. This . . . territory has been explored before, . . . [but] to it Jim Harrison has brought a fresh and original eye." Treadwell believes that "what satisfies most, perhaps, is the author's vigorous and often acerbic wit." "Harrison scores well on the firing range," J. D. Reed comments in Time. "His humor usually strikes in the killing zone."

In the Saturday Review, John Buckley finds that Warlock is "flawed in its timing, taking forever to start and then no time to end." Similarly, John D. Casey writes in the New York Times Book Review: "The only flaw in this book is its pacing. Mr. Harrison takes the first lap too slowly and the last lap too fast." Yet Casey contends that "the flaw is noticeable mainly because of the affection one develops for the novel's characters. Warlock is an engaging fellow, and his wife is a pretty nifty woman. I even liked his old dad and his mutt of a dog. So I didn't want to see these good creatures get so roughly tumbled about for the sake of the novel's big finish." "For all its unevenness of pacing," Casey concludes, "there are pleasures of all sorts to be had—farcical, reflective, luscious, gritty—in this stylish entertainment."

Julip, Harrison's 1994 book, broadens its author's concerns beyond those of the tradition of the macho American male. Like Legends of the Fall, Julip is a collection of three novellas that critics have compared favorably with the former work. In the title story readers are introduced to Julip, a resourceful young woman who is scheming to get her brother Bobby out of jail. Tribune Books reviewer Alan Cheuse calls it "a tribute to Harrison's subtle narrative Skills" that Julip's past is divulged so seamlessly within her present journey in "a novella [that] is a tribute to a young woman wise and talented beyond her years." Noting that Harrison was "saddled" with the legacy of writer Ernest Hemingway through much of his early career, New York Times Book Review critic Jonis Agee notes that while "All three novellas are set in American landscapes traditionally used as testing grounds for men. . . . the mythology of maleness often fails; appropriately enough, it is a woman, Julip . . . who comes most decisively to wisdom."

The two other novellas in Harrison's collection feature characteristic themes as well as characters that have appeared in Harrison's earlier works. The Native American called Brown Dog, which Cheuse calls "the very figure of an American existential hero," returns from Legends of the Fall to reminisce about his efforts at romancing a young anthropologist who is attempting to desecrate an Indian burial ground in "The Seven-Ounce Man." And in "The Beige Dolorosa," a fifty-year-old, divorced college professor accused of sexually harassing a young student leaves the high-stress political angling of campus life for the slow, relaxed cadences of the Latino Southwest. "Rollicking and sad, hilarious and startlingly sweet, smart and never cynical, these are stories that remind us no life should be overlooked or taken for granted," opines Kelly Cherry in her review of Julip for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Jonis adds that in Julip Harrison "establishe[s] himself as a genuinely comic writer." In 1988 Harrison introduced in Dalva the Northridges, a Nebraskan farming family whose legacy spans five generations. Dalva, a tough, independent forty-five-year-old woman, returns to Nebraska and the family farm to search for the son she gave up for adoption when she was fifteen years old. She is accompanied by her sometime lover, Michael, an alcoholic historian interested in the valuable Northridge family papers, which date from the end of the Civil War through the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, and the rich history they hold. Commenting on Dalva's "meditations upon her family, her loves, her losses and gains, her sense of the world she inhabits," Washington Post Book World reviewer Jonathan Yardley calls Harrison's character "that rare fictional creation, a character whom the reader would dearly love to meet." Readers got another chance to meet Dalva with the 1998 publication of The Road Home, Harrison's continuation of the multigenerational Northridge saga. Harrison uses five Northridge narrators, ranging from patriarch John Northridge, Dalva's grandfather, to Dalva's son Nelse. Library Journal reviewer Jim Dwyer calls The Road Home "not only a compelling drama but a profound consideration of how one lives a meaningful life." Commenting on the characters' various journeys in the novel, Booklist reviewer Frank Caso states the narratives "show us that the journey and the arrival can be of equal importance," and asserts that The Road Home will "ultimately take its place among the major works of American literature."

Harrison's ability to create realistic characters and settings, especially his landscapes of northern Michigan, has been praised by several reviewers. "Few writers can surpass Harrison at rendering vividly the sights, smells, and sounds of this world—the pleasures of dancing and hunting, the angular beauty of the American Midwest." Epps states. In the Christian Science Monitor, Parkman Howe finds that Farmer's "true touches" are its "descriptive passages . . . , such as the almost indiscernible, relentless coming on of seasons in upstate Michigan," and Prothro believes that Harrison "records the facts like an omnipresent reporter: details of the natural world as well as what his heroes feel, smell, see." Finally, a New Yorker reviewer praises the "graceful descriptions of rural northern-Michigan life and robust, empathetic portraits of country people" in Farmer. Concludes the reviewer: "Harrison . . . is at his best when he is telling us about hunting and fishing, about the swoop of a hawk, or about the way the light falls on a horse's flanks or the side of a barn."

Reviewing Harrison's collections of verse, critic M. L. Rosenthal dubs Harrison "one of our finest . . . poets." In New York Times Book Review, Rosenthal says that in his verse Harrison is "relentlessly hard on himself; his past life, his present plights, his character in general. But he redeems the poems from grimness by a buffoonery of anguish and by something else that is more elusive." "The something else," Rosenthal explains, "is an open, volatile atmosphere. It involves a sense of comic slovenliness originating in the self-ironies of folkspeech and unexpectedly convertible into an almost physical precision, that of a workman who knows just how to use his tools. . . . All the poetic faces and voices make themselves felt [in Outlyer and Ghazals]. It is sometimes exasperating, sometimes cheaply facile, often heart-breaking, often exquisitely beautiful as the waves of language and sense-impressions and uncontrollably black moods and randy philosophizing and esthetic balancings sweep over the pages." "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over," Rosenthal concludes, "a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." In Harper's, Hayden Carruth calls Letters to Yesinin "a minor masterpiece" but finds that Returning to Earth "seems not quite so successful . . . but still notable. . . . It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind. . . . [Harrison's] poetic vision is at the heart of it all. To stay alive now is primitivism. And that is the hard best that we can know." In 1998 Harrison gathered his entire poetic output in The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, covering over thirty years of verse, from his earliest published poems in Plainsong through a new, never-published sequence titled "Geo-Bestiary." Noticing a common link across the collection, a Publishers Weekly reviewer finds Harrison's works "share a self-confident ease, a desire for simple lyricism and an unbuttoned, slouching, at-home feel." Library Journal reviewer Rochelle Ratner, however, finds little structural continuity between the works in the collection, asserting "the poems were more pleasurable in their individual volumes," though she believes "Geo-Bestiary" shows Harrison in "top form." Donna Seaman, in Booklist, concurs, labelling "Geo-Bestiary" a "radiant bloom" to earlier poems in the collection which "go off like fireworks with a bang."