In 1970, Jim Harrison is the age when Christ died and carries the cross of alcoholism and depression. First he lost an eye and then his soul sister and his father, run over by a drunk driver. He is tired of earning his bread teaching literature to posh kids on the East Coast, so he reads Lorca and Rimbaud as if his life depended on each verse and goes fishing in remote places as if that would get him away from himself. Until one day he has an accident in the mountains: he falls off a cliff and shatters his spine. He will have to stay in bed for months and it is not clear if he will ever walk again. It could be the end. Or the beginning. Harrison spent the next two months bedridden and writing day and night on his father's old Remington. The result was "Wolf," an overwhelming, furious and beautiful novel, at times brutal, and lucid in every line.