A River Runs Through It and Other Stories is a semi-autobiographicalcollection of three stories by American author Norman Maclean published in 1976. It was the first work of fiction published by the University of Chicago Press. The collection contains the novella "A River Runs Through It" and two short stories, "Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'" and "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky", which precede the events of the novella. It received widespread acclaim upon its publication and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977, but the selection committee ultimately did not award the prize in that category that year. Two of the stories were later adapted into feature films.
"A River Runs Through It"
"A River Runs Through It" is a semi-autobiographical account of Maclean's relationship with his brother Paul and their upbringing in an early 20th-centuryMontana family in which "there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing." Pete Dexter, in a 1981 profile of Maclean in Esquire magazine, described the novella: As he describes his brother's alcoholism and gambling addiction, Maclean also explores how both afflictions have always followed the history of his family, even back to their earliest origins among Scottish Gaelic-speaking Presbyterians on the Isle of Mull. The story is noted for using detailed descriptions of fishing and the Montana landscape to engage with a number of profound metaphysical questions. In a review for the Chicago Tribune, critic Alfred Kazin stated: "There are passages here of physical rapture in the presence of unsullied primitive America that are as beautiful as anything in Thoreau and Hemingway".
"Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'"
"Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'" tells the story of Maclean working as a logger for the Anaconda Company at a logging camp on the Blackfoot River during the summer of 1928, when he was 25 and in graduate school. At the end of the previous summer working at the camp, Maclean had made an arrangement to work the next summer with the camp's best logger, Jim Grierson. Maclean describes how Grierson would work the logging season at a camp, then find a town with a nice Carnegie Public Library, get a library card, find a whore, preferably from the South, and spend the off-season reading, drinking, and having a relationship with the prostitute.
"USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky"
"USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky" tells of part of the summer of Maclean's seventeenth year, 1919. He spent that summer, as he had the previous two, working for the United States Forest Service, this time at Elk Summit, Idaho, west of Blodgett Canyon and approximately walking distance almost due west-northwest of Hamilton, Montana, near White Sand Creek, and north of East Fork Moose Creek. Working for the Forest Service in a very remote part of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in the Selway National Forest, Maclean had to extinguish wildfires, build trails, pack horses and mules, spend time alone on lookout duty at Grave Peak, and string telephone wire. The Elk Summit Work Center is located at the junction of Horse Creek and Hoodoo Creek, north-northwest of Hoodoo Mountain and north-northeast of Hoodoo Lake, at and an elevation of.
Publishing history
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was first published by the University of Chicago Press in May 1976, and has since been published in several formats: as a collection of short stories, bearing a title starting with that of the novella, and as a standalone novella, usually as an art book with many photographs or with many illustrations such as woodcuts. For much of its publishing history it was purposely not advertised, its publicity depending on word of mouth and critical mention. Talk of the "never advertised" book generated a considerable amount of publicity. A hardcover illustrated version issued in Chicago by the University of Chicago Press in 1989 with is still in print. The anthology of short stories with the novella, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, was issued as a paperback by the University of Chicago Press in 2003 with.
Pulitzer Prize
In 1977, the Pulitzer Prize committee for Fiction recommended A River Runs Through It be awarded the prize for that year. The Pulitzer Prize Board, which has final say for awarding the prize, chose to override their recommendation and decided not to award for fiction that year.
The following quote from the film version of A River Runs Through It, which is not present in the novella, is displayed at the base of the statue of Michael Jordan at Chicago's United Center:
