A River Runs through It and Other Stories

Norman Maclean (1902-1990), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana. As a young man, he worked in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. He was awarded an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago, teaching the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. After his retirement in 1973, he began to write the stories he liked to tell, which became the book A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, published to widespread acclaim. The book was the first work of original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press. It was nominated by a selection committee to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977, but the full committee ignored the nomination and did not award a Pulitzer in that category for the year. In the last years of his life, he wrote an account of the 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire. It was published posthumously as Young Men and Fire, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.