A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary EditionJust 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." |
Contents
A River Runs through It | 1 |
Logging and Pimping and Your Pal Jim | 105 |
The Ranger the Cook and a Hole in the Sky | 125 |
Common terms and phrases
asked bastard beautiful beer Big Brim big fish Bill Bell Bill's Bitterroot Bitterroot Valley Blackfoot Blackfoot River Blodgett Canyon brother Brown Trout Bull Durham camp cards cast Continental Divide cook crew cribbage damn door drink Eastern Brook Trout Elk Summit father feel feet felt fight fire fisherman flies fly fishermen fly fishing Forest Service front go fishing Hamilton hand head hell hole horse jacks jumped knew loggers looked Maclean miles Missoula Montana mother mountain mountain goats Neal never night Norman Maclean Old Rawhide pack Paul picked poker ranger remember river rock shirt side sitting started stood story suddenly summer sure talk tell thing thought told took tough town trail trees tried trying turned wade walked watching whore Wolf Creek woods