“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” With the grace and power of this line Norman Maclean begins his modern classic of fiction of the American West, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976). The two novellas and one short story comprising this autobiographical work remained dormant in the fertile mind of Maclean for many years before he settled down to write them. The book was a critical success and a popular best-seller and was adapted for the screen by Robert Redford in 1992. His previously uncollected speeches and essays were published in Norman Maclean (1988) along with contributions by authors such as Studs Terkel, William Kittredge, Wendell Berry, and Wallace Stegner. Maclean's last book, the posthumously published Young Men and Fire (1992), was the result of years of research. An account of the tragic Mann Gulch Fire of 1949 in Montana, it received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected one of the nine best books of 1992 by The New York Times Book Review.
