The novella format would become an important part of both Harrison's future reputation and his output. Following "Legends of the Fall", seven more collections of novellas appeared over the course of Harrison's lifetime: "The Woman Lit by Fireflies" (1990), "Julip" (1994), "The Beast God Forgot to Invent" (2000), "The Summer He Didn’t Die" (2005), "The Farmer's Daughter" (2009), "The River Swimmer" (2013), and finally "The Ancient Minstrel" (2016), the latter appearing just before Harrison's death in March of that year. After publishing "Warlock" (1981) and "Sundog" (1984), Harrison published "Dalva" (1988), one of his best-known novels. It is a complex tale, set in rural Nebraska, of a woman’s search for the son she had given up for adoption and for the boy’s father, who also happened to be her half-brother. Throughout the narrative, Dalva invokes the memory of her pioneer great-grandfather John Wesley Northridge, an Andersonville survivor during the Civil War and naturalist, whose diaries vividly tell of the destruction of the Plains Indian way of life. Many of these characters are featured also in "The Road Home" (1998), a complex work using five narrators, including Dalva, her 30-year-old son Nelse, and her grandfather John Wesley Northridge II. Harrison has been described as trying to get at "the soul history of where you live" in this sequel to "Dalva", in this case rural Nebraska in the latter half of the 20th century. By the time Harrison turned 60 in 1998, he had published both a dozen works of fiction and another dozen volumes of poetry. In terms of his publishing career, Harrison's final 18 years, after he turned 60, would be nearly as productive as the preceding 30 years. After age 60, he published another dozen works of fiction, at least six more volumes of poetry, a memoir "Off to the Side", and "The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand", a collection of his food essays which had first appeared in magazines, mostly in "Esquire" and "Men's Journal". Although he continued writing in the novella format, during these final years (1999-2016), Harrison refocused his efforts on the longer novel form. In the 2000s, Harrison published two of the most ambitious novels, setting them in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: "True North" (2004) and its sequel "Returning to Earth" (2007).