Legends of the Fall was published by Delacorte Press in 1979, containing three novellas: “Revenge,” “The Man Who Gave Up His Name,” and “Legends of the Fall.” The title novella made Harrison famous: it tells the story of three Montana brothers — Alfred, Tristan, and Samuel Ludlow — from World War I through the late twentieth century. Samuel is killed in the war; Tristan is driven mad by his brother’s death and spends decades wandering the world (running guns, hunting, drinking, loving); Alfred becomes a senator. Their father, Colonel Ludlow, watches his family disintegrate from his Montana ranch.
The title novella operates at mythic scale: Tristan is a figure from saga — larger than life, driven by passions that ordinary morality cannot contain. Harrison tells his story in compressed, allusive prose that covers decades in paragraphs, using the novella form’s compression to achieve an epic sweep that a longer novel might dilute. The Montana landscape — its mountains, its vastness, its indifference to human drama — provides the appropriate stage.
“Revenge” — a tale of sexual betrayal and violence set along the Mexico-Arizona border — is equally powerful: lean, violent, and structurally perfect. “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” is the collection’s gentlest story: a businessman abandoning his identity to start over. Together, the three novellas announced Harrison as a writer of extraordinary range and force.
Collecting Legends of the Fall
First edition (Delacorte Press, New York, 1979): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
- Very good: $75–$200
- Signed: $400–$800
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Harrison’s most famous work.
Three Novellas of the West
Legends of the Fall (1979) collects three novellas — “Revenge,” “The Man Who Gave Up His Name,” and the title story — that established Harrison as one of America’s great prose stylists. The title novella, a multi-generational saga of the Ludlow brothers in early twentieth-century Montana, became an iconic Brad Pitt film (1994), but Harrison’s prose is fiercer and more compressed than anything Hollywood could capture. The novellas share a preoccupation with violence, landscape, obsessive love, and the doomed vitality of men who cannot conform to civilization. The Delacorte Press first edition is the primary collecting target.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Jim Harrison? Harrison (1937–2016) was an American novelist, poet, and essayist who lived in Michigan and Montana. He was a legendary epicure, outdoorsman, and prose stylist whose work combined macho adventure with genuine literary ambition. His eye was blinded in a childhood accident, giving his face its distinctive asymmetry. He was one of the few American writers equally admired in France, where he was treated as a literary hero.