Description:
First published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has become an American classic, touching readers with its recollections of family, flyfishing, and the author's youth in the Montana woods. By turns raunchy, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales that express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie directed by Robert Redford, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. For this new edition, Robert Redford provides a foreword that recalls how he persuaded the reluctant Maclean to allow him to make a film of River.
Brief description: Norman Maclean (1902-1990), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana. As a young man, he worked in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. He was awarded an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago, teaching the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. After his retirement in 1973, he began to write the stories he liked to tell, which became the book A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, published to widespread acclaim. The book was the first work of original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press. It was nominated by a selection committee to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977, but the full committee ignored the nomination and did not award a Pulitzer in that category for the year. In the last years of his life, he wrote an account of the 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire. It was published posthumously as Young Men and Fire, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.
Review Quotes: "If there is a smarter, more affecting meditation on the themes of fathers and sons, brothers, the pleasures of the natural world, love, loss, and the haunting power of water, I have yet to come across it. As it has for many others, A River Runs through It became for me a kind of central text, equal parts fishing primer, literary masterwork, and spiritual guide. . . . It remains one of my most beloved books."--Jon Gluck "New York Times"