Name: Todd Goddard: Reading and Signing
Start: 2025-12-15T18:00:00-07:00
Location: Montgomery Distillery

About the Book: Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, A Writer’s Life explores Harrison's astonishing career, his 21 volumes of fiction, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva, and 14 books of poetry that helped to shape the course of contemporary American literature. As Will Blythe wrote in The New York Times, Harrison’s “books glisten with love of the world, and are as grounded as Thoreau’s in the particulars of American place—its rivers and thickets, its highways and taverns.” The late critic Alan Cheuse, writing for The Chicago Tribune, labeled Harrison “a national treasure.”
This book moves beyond the “legend” of Jim Harrison. It explores the emotional nuances of his many relationships, his intellectual depths, his volcanic passions, and his seemingly boundless appetites, with an eye always to the abundant connections between life and work. It also moves beyond Legends of the Fall. During his seventy-eight years of life, Harrison carved out an awesome legacy, particularly as a poet, defining what it means to be a writer in the second half of the twentieth century.
Drawing on Harrison’s vast, unpublished archives and the generous cooperation of the Harrison family and his closest friends, Devouring Time illuminates the mind and career of one of the most beloved, complicated, and troubled figures of his time. It will be published by Blackstone Publishing in 2025.
About the Author: Todd Goddard grew up in the Philadelphia area. He earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University; a J.D. from the University Connecticut School of Law, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Connecticut Journal of International Law, and a Ph.D. in literary studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, a Bordin-Gillette Fellowship from the University of Michigan, a Presidential Fellowship from UVU, a Mary Adams Trust Fellowship, a Humanities Exposed Grant, and a Vilas Research Travel Award, among others. He is currently a member of the Board of Trustees for Elk River Arts & Lectures.
His awards include the Joseph Glick Prize for International Law and multiple best paper awards from the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. He has published and presented widely on topics pertaining to American and English literature and history. An associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University, his newest project is a biography of the writer Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and almost twenty books of poetry.