A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition | Author: Norman Maclean | Language: English | Publisher: University of Chicago Press | Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches | ISBN-10: 226500667 | ISBN-13: 978-0226500669 | Publication Date: October 1, 2001 | Print Length: 239 pages

Originally published in 1976, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with this new edition featuring a foreword by Annie Proulx. Maclean, a retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, crafted what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century.

Growing up in the western Rocky Mountains during the first decades of the twentieth century, Maclean worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty.

Populated with characters such as drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, the stories are set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana. They explore the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.

By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” This edition marks a first offering from a 70-year-old writer whose work has also served as the basis for a top-grossing movie. It was the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press.