I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Wolf: A False Memoir (1971) was the result. You can put off a novel for a while but you can’t not write a poem because that particular muse is not very cooperative. "It’s totally uncontrollable" he says.

Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage by dint of their intelligence and some formal education. He has been called "a force of nature" and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.