Wolf: A False Memoir was published by Simon & Schuster in 1971. Swanson, the narrator, retreats to the Upper Michigan wilderness after the collapse of his marriage, his career, and his sense of purpose. He decides to track a wolf — one of the last wolves in the state — and in pursuing the animal through the winter landscape, he descends into a hallucinatory state where memory, fantasy, and present observation blend.
The novel is Harrison’s first and most raw: the prose is energetic, sometimes excessive, fueled by the same appetite and intensity that characterize his later work but not yet fully controlled. The “false memoir” subtitle signals the book’s method: Swanson’s memories (of his youth, his women, his failures) are unreliable, transformed by alcohol, cold, and isolation into something more like poetry than autobiography.
The Michigan setting — the Upper Peninsula’s forests, its winter severity, its sparse population — establishes the territory Harrison would return to throughout his career. The wolf serves as both literal quarry and symbolic figure: the wild nature that civilization has nearly exterminated, the primal self that Swanson seeks beneath his educated, civilized surface.
Collecting Wolf: A False Memoir
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1971): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $60–$150
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Harrison’s first novel.
Northern Michigan
Wolf: A False Memoir (1971) was Harrison’s first novel — a lean, picaresque account of a man wandering through northern Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in search of one of the last wolves in the region. The narrator, Swanson, is a Harrison prototype: hard-drinking, sex-obsessed, intellectually restless, and deeply connected to landscape. The novel established Harrison’s territory — both geographic (Michigan, Montana) and thematic (nature, appetite, male loneliness). Simon & Schuster published it in a small print run; first editions are scarce.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Harrison a nature writer? He resisted the label, though landscape is central to everything he wrote. Harrison was more interested in appetite — for food, sex, alcohol, and experience — than in ecological observation. His nature is not peaceful; it is wild, indifferent, and exhilarating.