On Norman Maclean’s 'A River Runs Through It'

Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It turns fifty this year. Its author was a retired English professor from the University of Chicago who, at the point late in life when he began work on the book, had published only a handful of essays in literary criticism. The University of Chicago Press took a flier on a manuscript set in Western Montana that, as the legend goes, was turned down by several major New York publishers because it had “trees in it.”