Jim Harrison, the prolific half-blind masculinist writer of many books of fiction and poetry, has died at 78.

Harrison was perhaps the last of a certain kind of writer, a craggy individualist compared often (to his apparent annoyance) to Hemingway and Faulkner; a man of great appetites (of which food should be included, as he wrote extensively on the subject), an outdoorsman, and, as might be imagined, an iconoclast of the particular rugged American variety.

He enjoyed his solitude ("I put a sign up in my driveway — 'Do not stop here unless you’ve called first' — but I didn’t have a phone"), but survived his wife of fifty years by only five months.

His string of awards and accolades was long and storied, and includes a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His poetry was sometimes published by Copper Canyon Press — which is a Northwest connection worthy of note. Maybe it's right to close by quoting from one: in his poem "Barking", he said:

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.