Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River
Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have
readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English
professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70,
Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the
classic American stories of the twentieth century.
Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and
Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth
anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a
foreword by Annie Proulx.
Maclean grew up in the
western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the
twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in
logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The
two novellas and short story in this collection are based on
his own experiencesthe experiences of a young man who found
that life was only a step from art in its structures and
beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves
a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods
when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot,
without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated
with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in
the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains
of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the
complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires,
playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.
By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac,
these are superb tales which 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, 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. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new
edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for
hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as
fish swim and books are made."
"Altogether beautiful
in the power of its feeling. . . . As beautiful as anything
in Thoreau or Hemingway."—Alfred Kazin, Chicago Tribune
Book World
"It is an enchanted tale. . . . I have
read the story three times now, and each time it seems
fuller."— Roger Sale, New York Review of
Books
"Maclean's book—acerbic, laconic,
deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes
Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and
Nelson Algren. I love its sound."—James R. Frakes, New
York Times Book Review
"The title novella is the
prize. . . . Something unique and marvelous: a story that is
at once an evocation of nature's miracles and realities and
a probing of human mysteries. Wise, witty, wonderful,
Maclean spins his tales, casts his flies, fishes the rivers
and the woods for what he remembers from his youth in the
Rockies."—Publishers Weekly
"Ostensibly a
'fishing story,' 'A River Runs through It' is really an
autobiographical elegy that captivates readers who have
never held a fly rod in their hand. In it the art of casting
a fly becomes a ritual of grace, a metaphor for man's
attempt to move into nature."—Andrew Rosenheim, The
Independent
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