In April 1976, an academic press published a book containing two novellas and one short story, all set in the American West. It was written by a slight, craggy-faced man named Norman Maclean. It had been snubbed by the publishing literati, deemed unmarketable.
But Maclean would have the last word.
Thanks to the titular novella, “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories” went on to sell more than a million copies, and is now considered a classic. It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie, directed by Robert Redford and starring Brad Pitt, and helped supercharge the fly fishing industry. And it remains beloved by generations of readers and writers.
“The novella is one of the great American stories of the 20th century, a lesson on how to write,” said the author Annie Proulx.
“It’s romantic and erudite and filled with visceral excitements,” the author Thomas McGuane added. “And there is so much under the surface in this short work. It has a huge power-to-weight ratio.”
“A River Runs Through It” turns 50 this month. In getting to its exalted place, the book had to navigate a tricky set of rapids. Though it sailed through them, a question lingers half a century later: Would a book like this, with its regional setting and its male and outdoorsy focus, face different challenges in today’s publishing world?
Even in the 1970s, the novella almost never came to be. Maclean worked for 45 years as an English teacher and administrator at the University of Chicago, a stern but beloved figure on campus. Upon retirement in 1973, he wrote to a friend and said, “I think I’ll try a little writing.”
It was not something he’d done often. Maclean only published two academic articles during his career. According to Rebecca McCarthy, his biographer and former student, he initially intended to write a fly fishing primer.
Abandoning that idea, Maclean instead wrote a lightly fictionalized story centered on the death of his younger brother, Paul. He called it a “love poem to my family,” according to a memoir written by his son, John Maclean. The book’s fishing sequences intertwine with its many themes: masculinity, family, faith, nature and addiction.
“When I first read it as a young man, I did so as a fishing book,” said the author Rick Bass. “On my second reading, it was Norman’s book. And then, finally, it became a book about Paul, a story about tragedy.”
Maclean was 6 when his family moved from Iowa to Montana, where his father became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Missoula. Maclean and his brother were initially home-schooled by their upright father, who taught the Bible, poetry, literature and the art of fly fishing, the latter done primarily on the Big Blackfoot River.
In that discipline, Maclean, like his father, was measured and patient. Paul, on the other hand, was a limit-pushing supernova, able to cast farther, wade deeper and catch bigger trout.
The sons eventually attended proper school, and Maclean ended up at Dartmouth College, where he took a poetry class taught by Robert Frost. Though Maclean befriended a classmate named Theodore Geisel, who would later be known as Dr. Seuss, he never much liked the snobbishness of the East Coast. That distaste was magnified after he wrote his first book.
Maclean went to the University of Chicago in 1928, as a graduate student and assistant professor. Back home in Montana, Paul, who was a newspaper reporter, succumbed to his addictions to gambling and alcohol. Paul moved to Chicago in the 1930s, presumably to start fresh under Maclean’s watch. But in 1938, at the age of 32, he was found fatally beaten in an alley. (In the novella, Paul dies in Montana.)
“Maclean’s novella was an attempt to work out that tragedy through the aesthetic power of his writing and the depiction of Paul’s angling skills,” said James Chandler, a professor of English at the University of Chicago and a friend of Maclean’s.
The book was sent to publishers on submission in 1975, when Maclean was 72. He was a first-time author, and his age was a factor.
“People would say, ‘How could someone as old as you write a book?’” McCarthy said. “And you could see the smoke come out of his ears.”
At Swallow Press, which was then a Chicago-based publisher and is now an imprint of Ohio University Press, he was turned down because the work was deemed too short. And an editor at Knopf wrote that he’d shared the book with his boss, Robert Gottlieb, who said it was “not a saleable book.”
The University of Chicago Press came to the rescue of its beloved former professor, breaking precedent by publishing its first work of fiction. The initial print run: 5,000.
Nick Lyons, an English professor and book publisher, received a bound galley and wrote what he describes as a “short but glowing review” for Fly Fisherman magazine. Hundreds of other reviews soon followed. The University of Chicago Press was forced to print new editions to keep up with demand.
In 1977, a jury for the Pulitzer Prize recommended “A River Runs Through It” for its fiction award. The Pulitzer board, however, declined to name a winner, citing a down year in the discipline.
Was the book too autobiographical? Too regional? Too short? Or, as the novelist David James Duncan suggests, possibly weighted down by the accompanying stories, which didn’t have the same literary heft? It remains a mystery. But Maclean never let a slight go to waste.
“He sort of enjoyed, exaggerated and dined out on his rejection from the East Coast literati,” said Alan Thomas, the editorial director at the University of Chicago Press and the editor of Maclean’s second book, “Young Men and Fire,” which was published posthumously in 1992.
After the success of “A River Runs Through It,” a Knopf editor asked if Maclean would submit his next manuscript. Maclean fulfilled what he called “the dream of every rejected author” in declining, ending his scathing return letter with: “If the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole author, that would mark the end of books.”
Maclean died at the age of 87 in 1990, two years before Redford’s movie adaptation was released. The movie put the book on the New York Times best-seller list, inspired legions of new fly anglers and brought a slew of coastal refugees to the state of Montana, “all flying in on their Lear jets,” said McGuane, who admits he was partially responsible for that: He was the one who had initially given the book to Redford.
The 50th anniversary of “A River Runs Through It” comes at what feels to some like a perilous time for male readership of fiction. A 2022 study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts indicated a large gender gap when it comes to reading fiction, finding that 46.9 percent of women read fiction, compared to 27.7 percent of men.
There is little other data to back up this contention. Sales of literary fiction overall have been dropping for decades. But the continued successes of writers like Jim Butcher, Jack Carr and Andy Weir, as well as the enduring popularity of literary novels by writers like Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace, suggest that broad concerns over male readership of fiction may be overblown.
Still, there is an undeniable feeling of unease among some publishers and booksellers over a troublesome present and future, propelled along by a spate of opinion pieces and the roles played by influencers, podcasters and Silicon Valley executives in circumscribing contemporary masculinity. Titles recommended in recent years by Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Mark Zuckerberg all skew heavily toward nonfiction.
McGuane is among those who believe the novella might have faced a fresh set of obstacles in getting attention had it been submitted to big publishers today.
“I don’t see a burning interest in literary male writing,” he said. “It’s not a good era for male self-discovery.”
“A River Runs Through It,” though, remains timeless. The novella’s elegiac last lines act as sort of a Western rejoinder to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ending in “The Great Gatsby” — published 51 years earlier — when the Dutch sailors see the “fresh green breast of the new world,” with its now “vanished trees.” Fitzgerald wrote that we were fated to be “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Maclean ends his novella as an old man fishing in the “Arctic half-light of the canyon,” where “eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” He, too, confronted the inescapability of the past — no matter what the present and future held — in his searing last line: “I am haunted by waters.”
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