I just came across this 2006 Publishers Weekly piece about Jim Harrison. I confess I’ve never read any of his work (I’m dreadfully ignorant in the modern fiction department), but the article made me curious about his work.

Here are the stories that shaped him, that come up again and again in his books and his conversation: the car crash that killed his father and 19-year-old sister; the accident that nearly blinded him; the miserable, if profitable years he spent as a screenwriter in Hollywood (“If you’re an actual novelist, you get treated a lot better than [just] a screenwriter…. They cheat you, but you get cheated at a [high financial] level you find inconceivable,” he says now.)…

“I won’t talk or deal with a young writer unless I sense he has utterly given his life over to it,” Harrison says. “It’s a waste of my time. If they don’t feel ‘called’—why in God’s name would you do this?”