A River Runs through It and Other Stories [Paperback]

When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript ofA River Runs through It and Other Storiesto New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Forty years later, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs through Ithas established itself as a classic of the American West. This new edition will introduce a fresh audience to Maclean’s beautiful prose and understated emotional insights.

Elegantly redesigned,A River Runs through Itincludes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation ofRiver. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.”

Norman Maclean(1902–90), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in and around Missoula, Montana, and worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service before beginning his academic career. He was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago until 1973.

A River Runs through It
Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”
USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Skylc.