My favorite literary character is Brown Dog. Brown Dog is the libidinous trickster, the quiet hero, the ribald dreamer, and the aggressive life lover from the mind of one of America’s greatest writers, Jim Harrison.

Brown Dog manages to challenge the pedestrian pettiness, the boring moralism, the Puritanical asceticism, and the politically correct conventions of American culture. More importantly, he has fun, and he lives according to a code of compassion, while doing it.

I recently had the pleasure and privilege of writing about Brown Dog for the Daily Beast. The resultant essay is one of my personal favorites. I hope that readers who already admire the work of Jim Harrison find it insightful, and that readers just making an introduction to Harrison and Brown Dog use it as motivation to pick up the books.

As I write in the essay, “Any American in desperate need of rescue from long commutes, cable news, shop talk from a cubicle, dreary suburban sprawl, and the contrived sexuality of predictable pop culture, would do well to sit down with Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog, and meet a new friend who will graciously give him a tour of a wonderfully debauched and always inspired life of energy, mystery, and avidity.”

The tour can start here.