Norman Maclean

Too young to enlist in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, Maclean found work in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service in what is now the Bitterroot National Forest of northwestern Montana. The novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky[4] and the story "Black Ghost" in Young Men and Fire (1992) are semi-fictionalized accounts of these experiences.

Maclean later attended Dartmouth College, where he served as editor-in-chief of the humor magazine the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern; the editor-in-chief to follow him was Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss and who, according to MacLean, was “the craziest guy I ever met.”[5] He was also a member of the Sphinx and Beta Theta Pi. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1924 and chose to remain in Hanover, New Hampshire to serve as an instructor until 1926—a time he recalled in "This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon: A Few Remarks on the Art of Teaching".[6]

On September 24, 1931, Maclean married Jessie Burns (1905–1968),[7] a redheaded Scots-Irish woman from Wolf Creek, Montana. They later had two children: a daughter Jean (born in 1942), now a lawyer, and a son, John (born in 1943), now a journalist and author of Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire (1999) and two other books, Fire & Ashes (2003) and The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal (2007).[8]

Maclean began graduate studies in English at the University of Chicago in 1928 and earned a doctorate in 1940. During World War II, he declined a commission in naval intelligence to serve as Dean of Students. During the war he also served as Director of the Institute on Military Studies and co-authored Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs.[9] Maclean eventually became the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of English and taught the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. "Every year I said to myself, 'You better teach this bastard so you don't forget what great writing is like.' I taught him technically, two whole weeks for the first scene from Hamlet. I'd spend the first day on just the line, 'Who's there?'"[10] U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who took a poetry class taught by Maclean at the University of Chicago, credited him as "the teacher to whom I am most indebted."[11] Maclean also wrote two scholarly articles, "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century" and "Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear",[12] the latter describing a theory of tragedy that he revisited in his later work.

After his retirement in 1973, he began, as his children Jean and John had often encouraged him, to write down the stories he liked to tell. In 1976, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was published to widespread acclaim. The book was the first work of 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 1992, A River Runs Through It was adapted into a motion picture directed by Robert Redford and released by Columbia Pictures, starring Craig Sheffer as Maclean, Brad Pitt, Brenda Blethyn, Emily Lloyd and Tom Skerritt.

During 1991, a renovated church retirement home was turned into an undergraduate dormitory on the University of Chicago campus named Maclean House. Maclean House's mascot was the "Stormin' Normans" in honor of its namesake. The dorm was closed after the 2015–2016 academic year and subsequently sold to be turned into apartments.[13]

Maclean died in Chicago on August 2, 1990.[14]

He spent the last years of his life attempting to write a non-fiction account of the 1949 Mann Gulch Forest Fire. The manuscript was published posthumously as Young Men and Fire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. In 2008, the University of Chicago Press published a new compendium of unpublished and some previously published works, The Norman Maclean Reader. The anthology included parts of a never-finished book about George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn which Maclean had worked on from 1959 to 1963. Publishers Weekly gave the book a respectful review in Summer 2008, remarking, "Readers of the two earlier books will find, as Weltzien [Alan Weltzien, the book's editor] phrases it, 'new biographical insights into one of the most remarkable and unexpected careers in American letters.'"

• 1940: The Theory of Lyric Poetry from the Renaissance to Coleridge[15]
• 1943: A Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs (with Everett C. Olson)[16]
• 1976: A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (Illustrated by Barry Moser in 1989)[17]
• 1992: Young Men and Fire[18]

• 1952: Two essays—(1) "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century" and (2) "Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear"[19] and (2) —in R.S. Crane's Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern[20]
• 1956: "Personification But Not Poetry" in ELH: English Literary History Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1956), pp. 163–170.

• 1988: Norman Maclean (edited by Ron McFarland and Hugh Nichols)[21]
• 2008: The Norman Maclean Reader (edited by O. Alan Weltzien)[22]