James "Jim" Harrison (born December 11, 1937) is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, reviews, essays about the outdoors, and writings about food. He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage in spite of their intelligence and some formal education. They attune themselves to both the natural and the civilized world, surrounded by excesses but determined to live their lives as well as possible.