One stab is that in the literary profession, which was my life profession, it was always said that no one began serious writing late in life. There will be a certain amount of truth to them, but no one ever knows why he tries something big in life. I can’t answer that, but I’ll make a couple of stabs. Why did you start writing fiction so late in life? I think it always entails terrific self discipline. Of course some people can do it seemingly by genes and birth, but I don’t think nearly as often as one would think. It’s like anything you do that’s rather beautiful. You have to give up a lot of yourself to do it well. It’s conceivable that someone could find it smirky and pleasurable on some kind of level, but I think it’s a highly disciplined art. In “A River Runs Through It,” you wrote, “Good things come by grace, grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” Is that true of writing? My father thought it had the grace of eternal salvation in it. I think it’s one of the most graceful things an individual can do out in the woods. It’s taught me many, many things about grace.
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What has fly fishing taught you about the nature of grace? I suppose I get some second hand pleasure by writing about it. If you want big fish, you fish big water. And that’s the only fishing I like to do, fishing the big rivers. I’ve lost my sense of balance, and I can’t stand up on those big rocks and I can’t fish that big hard water. I don’t think I’ll ever be very good at it again. I hope I’ll still be able to fish a little before I quit for good. A couple of years ago I hurt my hip and I haven’t been able to work very well since then. We would camp out for a month on some big river, the Bitterroot or the Blackfoot. My father was a Presbyterian minister and always had at least a month off in the summer. I was about six when we came to Montana, and almost immediately we started going on these vacations and my father started teaching me to fly fish. In talking about his work, he salted his speech with profanity, colored it with anecdotes and local legends, and always spoke with the rhythm and music of poetry just underneath his prose.
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Maclean was a short, stout man with a face creased with wrinkles. The sun filtering through the branches produced a light as meditative and otherworldly as that of the great Gothic cathedrals.
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The cabin sat on the west shore of the lake in a magnificent grove of larch trees that formed an immense canopy overhead. Most of the year Maclean made his home in Chicago, but in the summer he returned to his log cabin on Seeley Lake, Montana. On September 24, 1931, he married Jessie Burns, who died in 1968. His nonfiction book, Young Men and Fire (1992), examined the causes of the tragic Mann Gulch Forest Fire. The author of many articles and stories, scholarly and otherwise, Maclean also helped edit Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, published in 1952 by the University of Chicago Press. When he retired from the university in 1973, he was the William Harper Rainey Professor of English. Three times the institution awarded him its prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching. from the University of Chicago in 1940, where he began teaching in 1930. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1924 with an A.B. The other stories, “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim’” and “USFS 1919: The Ranger, The Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” bring together Maclean’s practical knowledge of logging, fire fighting and woodsmanship with his deep sensitivity to language and prose rhythms.īorn on Decemin Clarinda, Iowa, Maclean spent much of his youth in and around Missoula, Montana. “A River Runs Through It” is the title story of a collection published in 1976 by the University of Chicago Press. The novella makes sense of his senseless death in the only way it can: it makes beautiful through art and love that which will always surpass understanding. N orman Maclean's novella, “A River Runs Through It,” tries to come to terms with a tragedy of his family’s inability to help his brother Paul-a gambler, a street fighter, a genius with a fly rod-who, one day in 1938, was found in an alley, beaten to death with a gun butt.