This month marks the 50th anniversary of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, the bestselling book that turned Norman Maclean into a late-in-life literary phenomenon and then a household name after the success of Robert Redford’s film based on the title story. In her book Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, journalist Rebecca McCarthy drew on her long friendship with the beloved author-educator to reveal the forces and events that shaped him and formed the bedrock of his stories. Here, McCarthy reflects on how she continued to learn about the iconic yet elusive literary figure long after she was finished writing her biography,
In May 2024, the University of Washington Press published my biography, Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers. On a book tour that spring, I was surprised to learn that many people had no idea Norman wasn’t just some old guy who liked to fish and who sometimes wrote stories. They somehow missed the fact that he had held a chaired professorship in the University of Chicago English department, where he had a storied career for almost fifty years, usually teaching Shakespeare and poetry. Students loved and feared him.
He could “read around” in Greek and French and knew most everything about lyric poetry, scansion, meter, Hopkins’ sprung rhythm and varieties of the sonnet, as well as woodworking, medieval warfare, wildflowers, geology, Enrico Fermi and, of course, fishing. Once he left the state for good in 1931, he never had a Montana license plate or driver’s license. He became a “summer person,” spending several weeks in his family’s cabin on Seeley Lake before returning to his home in Chicago. I wonder how many people who haven’t read and taught and absorbed great literature for decades could write a masterpiece like “A River Runs Through It”?
I thought I knew a lot about Norman—I met him when I was sixteen, and I went to college at the University of Chicago at his insistence. Before gaining access to his papers in Regenstein Library, I spent years talking to his friends, neighbors, family members, Dartmouth classmates, former students and their families, family members of his late brother’s friends, members of his father’s Presbyterian church, residents in Clarinda, Iowa, his University of Chicago colleagues, and their families.
And yet, during my book tour, I learned even more about him, adding more stories to what my decades of research and friendship had revealed to me. People who attended readings and signings were his former students, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, each sharing their stories and memories of this complicated, flinty, and generous man. Former students and fly-fishing people wrote to me, asking questions about him. Some I could answer, some I couldn’t.
A young man taking Norman’s Victorian poetry class in 1969 remembers him walking into class, cigarette in his mouth, sitting down on the desk in the front of the room, putting the cigarette on the desk and then reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” by heart.
While I was in college, Norman read to me parts of his stories about his brother and about the US Forest Service before they were published in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. He knew when he finished the title piece that he had written a perfect story about love and loss and helplessness—from decades of teaching Shakespeare, he knew what made for great writing. A few months before his first book appeared, Norman steamed ahead on his second project, which focused on the deaths of thirteen young men fighting a fire outside Helena, Montana in Mann Gulch. He titled the book Burning Bright: the life story of a tragedy. He spent years researching and writing, and rewriting, never satisfied, until, debilitated by disease, he set the manuscript aside.
Norman didn’t live to see the publication of his second book, renamed Young Men and Fire, assembled by University of Chicago Press humanities editor Alan Thomas and subsequently published by Chicago. (Alan details the book’s publication story in a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books.) Nor did Norman see the release of Robert Redford’s award-winning film, which set off a stampede of fly-fishing folk, fishing guides, and fishing outfitters to the rivers of Montana. Since his death in 1990 there have been special editions of his books, with introductions by Timothy Egan, Annie Proulx, and Robert Redford himself. As members of the flyfishing world as well as literary scholars know well, Norman’s output was meager, though beloved.
But Norman Maclean is having a moment. In addition to my biography, we have George Jensen and Heidi Skurat’s Norman Maclean: A Search for Beauty and Timothy Schilling’s The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth Amid Tragedy. Jensen and Skurat offer granular details about how Norman wrote his iconic story. Packrat that he was, Norman kept every pencil-smeared iteration. I think he knew he was writing a perfect story with “A River Runs Through It,” and he realized someone would want to learn how he did it. Skurat and Jensen tell us. The third is a critical assessment of Norman’s work, saying he was intent on exploring the tragic side of life and finding truth. Shilling lays out a well-written argument.
But back to what I learned after my book appeared.
A young man taking Norman’s Victorian poetry class in 1969 remembers him walking into class, cigarette in his mouth, sitting down on the desk in the front of the room, putting the cigarette on the desk and then reciting Gerard Manly Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” by heart. Norman had told me he quit smoking in 1950 when his wife was diagnosed with emphysema, but that obviously wasn’t the case. Later in the course, Norman read from an unidentified student’s paper and then said to the class “not exactly deathless prose.” The student told Norman he had bought a 1959 Desoto with a 383 hemi-head, four-barrel carburetor motor. Norman said he once had a Desoto that would “pass everything on the road but a gas station.” The student’s car got about 11 miles to the gallon.
Another student wrote that he had been in a 1970 course on William Wordsworth, one of Norman’s favorite poets. He was given a C on a paper on “Westminster Bridge.” Norman told him he should have used a .22 but instead he had used a shotgun, then told him to come by his office on Friday. Several days later, the student trudged up the stairs to Norman’s office, tucked high in the tower of Gates Blake Hall, convinced he would learn his graduate career was over. Norman poured him a cup of coffee and told him, “You’re rusty. You have a fine mind and you’ll do well here, but you’re rusty. You’ve been in the Navy for several years.”
The student had had two deployments in Vietnam and was an engineering officer for the recovery of Apollo 13. “You’re out of shape, you’re rusty. The quick way to get rid of that rust is to kick it off.” The student hadn’t mentioned his time in service; Norman had checked out his admissions form. The rest of the course, he earned As and Bs. Norman, I was told, was very gung-ho about Vietnam.
I learned that in the spring of 1976, Norman gave his first public reading from A River Runs Through It and Other Stories at Ida Noyes Hall on the University of Chicago campus. After he finished, he took a few questions from the audience, most of whom were connected to the university. Paul Ausick, one of Norman’s former students, told Norman he’d heard Paramount had optioned the title story. Norman nodded. Paul then said, “And I hear you said you want Robert Redford to play you.” After a few seconds Norman said, “I’m sorry, Paul, I don’t know who that is.”
Later, Norman went to Sundance, where he mingled with various Hollywood actors, producers, and directors. When he returned to Chicago, his grandsons asked him if he had seen anyone famous. Norman told them he had met “some guy named Newton.” With Robert Redford expressing interest in making a movie of “A River Runs Through It,” Norman wanted to see one of his movies—the last film he had seen was “High Noon” in 1952. So, he settled down with his grandsons to watch “The Sting.” When Paul Newman came on the screen, Norman said, “There he is, there’s Newton.”
At one of my readings, in Missoula, a former Smokejumper, who was well into his nineties, stood and announced that Norman had been wrong about Mann Gulch, and that he, the jumper, had the chops to prove it. Another older guy stood and tried to silence the old Jumper, who kept saying Norman had gotten things wrong—as Norman had feared.
In a Livingston bookstore, I met a Livingston native who’d been in a graduate class I took at Chicago. Without the beard and long hair he sported in college, he wasn’t recognizable until he smiled. He told me I had suggested he introduce himself to Norman, who was interested in students from Montana. So off he went to Norman’s office, where he told Norman he was from Livingston and was working on a master’s in social science.
“Livingston,” said Norman. “Hummm,” no doubt thinking about the fish in the nearby Gallatin, Madison, and Big Hole rivers.
“I don’t fish.”
Norman’s eyebrows went up.
“I can sit on river rocks all day, holding a pole, but I don’t like to fish.”
Calling a fly rod a pole was akin to calling a rifle a gun. The rest of the conversation was brief and strained.
A Chicago student who had lived in Norman’s condo one summer while he was in Montana told me that before Norman had headed West, he had insisted she come over and learn a few things about his home. He expected her to take care of the roses in the garden area in front of his building. And then he showed her how he wanted her to polish his mother’s dining room table, which was made of teak. He said he did it every day with lemon oil, and expected her to follow suit.
I had eaten many meals at that table, and had noticed its shine, but I hadn’t known how Norman cared for it. I like the idea of Norman polishing the wood, and I imagine as he did so that he was thinking of the mother who had adored him.
Rebecca McCarthy is a writer who spent twenty-one years as an award-winning reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her work has been published in the New York Times, American Scholar, Fast Company, and other venues. Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers is her first book.
