In his eighty-eight years, Norman Maclean (1902-90) played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, which won him enduring fame and critical acclaim - as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection "A River Runs Through It and Other Stories" was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella - based largely on Maclean's memories of early twentieth-century Montana - has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written. The posthumous publication in 1992 of "Young Men and Fire", Maclean's deeply personal investigative account of a deadly forest fire, only added to his reputation, reacquainting readers with the power of his spare, evocative prose.With "The Norman Maclean Reader", the University of Chicago Press is proud to add a fitting final volume to Maclean's celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his two masterpieces, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career.Much of the pleasure of "The Norman Maclean Reader" lies in the rounded picture it gives of Maclean the man. A series of witty, perceptive personal essays present Maclean from a variety of angles: in "This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon," the master teacher distills the lessons of decades in the classroom; in "The Pure and the Good: On Baseball and Backpacking," Maclean the scholar turns his attention to poetic rhythm and the importance of craft; in "Retrievers Good and Bad," we see Maclean the memoirist first beginning to draw on his wealth of family stories.A generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, serve to flesh out the Reader's portrait of Maclean, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the recondite atmosphere of the University of Chicago as in the quiet hills of his beloved Montana. The letters find Maclean corresponding about fishing with Nick Lyons, the first significant reviewer of "A River Runs Through It"; about literature and teaching with Marie Borroff, a former student who had become a professor of literature at Yale; about the Mann Gulch fire with Lois Jansson, the widow of one of Maclean's sources; and about General Custer with historian Robert Utley.Maclean's writings on Custer comprise the most extensive unpublished material in the Reader. Fascinated by Custer's tragic end and posthumous fame, Maclean dedicated years in the late 1950s to studying the general, and though he was never able to shape his chapters on the topic into a complete book, to read them now is revelatory: as he explores the man and myth of Custer, we see Maclean groping toward the rigorous yet personal hybrid form of historical storytelling that he would employ to such effect in "Young Men and Fire".Multifarious and moving, the works collected in "The Norman Maclean Reader" serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature's most distinctive voices.

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 experiences--the 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"