Norman Maclean

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This article is about the American author. For other people, see Norman Maclean (disambiguation).

Norman Maclean
John Maclean
ParentsJohn Maclean (father)

Norman Fitzroy Maclean (December 23, 1902 – August 2, 1990) was an American professor at the

Hemingwayesque writing, his collection of novellas A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976), and the creative nonfiction book Young Men and Fire
(1992).

Family origins

In his

Clan MacLean stronghold, the Isle of Mull".[2]

Maclean's great-grandfather, Laughlan Maclean, was a carpenter who, accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth Campbell, emigrated to

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1821, before they settled on a homestead in Pictou County.[2]

Maclean's father, Rev.

Pembina, Manitoba, on August 1, 1893.[6]

Biography

Early life

Maclean was born at

the Bible or from some religious poet. He was a very good reader... that was very good for me because in doing that, he would bring out the rhythms of the Bible. That reading instilled in me this great love of rhythm in language."[9] His father also passed on to both of his sons a passion for fly fishing which he had begun and developed in Clarinda. As a child, Maclean also often witnessed his father, whose first language was Canadian Gaelic, working hard to learn Canadian English diction and elocution
.

In 1909, his family relocated to Missoula, Montana, at the invitation of its Presbyterian church elders. The following years considerably influenced and inspired Maclean's writings, appearing prominently in the short story The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers (1977) and the semi-autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976).[10]

Forest Service

When Maclean was 14 years old, he found work with the United States Forest Service in the Bitterroot National Forest of northwestern Montana. The novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky[11] and the story "Black Ghost" in Young Men and Fire (1992) are semi-fictionalized accounts of these experiences.

Dartmouth

Maclean later attended Dartmouth College, where he served as editor-in-chief of the humor magazine the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern. His successor as editor-in-chief was Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss who, Maclean described as "the craziest guy I ever met."[12] He was also a member of the Sphinx and Beta Theta Pi.

During a 1986 interview, Maclean described the enormous gratitude he felt for having been able to attend creative writing classes taught at Dartmouth by the poet Robert Frost. Maclean stated that he learned an enormous amount from Frost, which he carried with him for the rest of his life.[13] During the same interview, Maclean recalled that his lifelong admiration for and emulation of the writing style of Ernest Hemingway also began during his time at Dartmouth.[13]

Maclean 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".[14]

Personal life

Maclean met his future wife, Jessie Burns, during a December party in the Helena valley. They were returning home after the party with another couple in Jessie's car, when a

John Norman Maclean
(born in 1943) who became a journalist and author.

Following their marriage, Jessie handled the family's finances and wrote all the checks.

literary allusions and with simplicity. She came to be a sort of housemother. In being this, she was unaware of it - no self-satisfied awareness that what she was doing was noble. She was not playacting. It was part of her existence."[19] Jessie died in 1968, of emphysema and cancer of the esophagus, the result of decades of chain smoking.[20]

Maclean's family always led two lives, according to his son. One life was during the summers at the log cabin built by Maclean's father near Seeley Lake, Montana. The other life took place in Chicago during the academic year.[21]

Maclean gave up typing and wrote almost everything, including his books, "in a cramped longhand that generations of typists at the University and elsewhere prided themselves on learning to decipher."[22]

Murder of Paul MacLean

Maclean's younger brother,

gambler, notorious brawler and a womanizer. Maclean suggested all of these addictions and behaviors had a very long generational history and could be traced all the way back to the Maclean family's earliest origins among the Gaels of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland.[1]
Despite repeated attempts by his family to help, Paul rejected all overtures.

On the early morning of May 2, 1938, Paul was murdered. He was attacked and brutally beaten at Sixty-Third Street and Drexel Avenue in

loansharking debt. No arrests were ever made and the case remains unsolved.[24]

Maclean accompanied his brother's casket, alone, on an overnight train trip from Chicago to Montana. After the funeral, Maclean spent several weeks of compassionate leave with his parents at their family's cabin at Seeley Lake.[25]

Maclean's father was understandingly very skeptical of the Chicago Police Department's official explanation for his son's murder and asked Maclean, "Do you think it was just a stick-up and foolishly he tried to fight his way out? You know what I mean -- that it wasn't connected to anything in his past?" Maclean replied that the Chicago Police Department didn't know and that neither did he.

nonfiction and advised, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."[28]

During visits to the cabin at Seeley Lake in later years, his son often heard Maclean calling out over the lake in the evenings, "Paul! Paul!"[29]

University of Chicago

Maclean began graduate studies in

PhD
in 1940.

Like his contemporary

C.S. Lewis, Maclean acquired a reputation for personal magnetism and for making the writings of difficult Medieval authors like François Rabelais and Geoffrey Chaucer come alive in the lecture hall. One of his students later said, "Maclean is one of the best liked guys around this place. He is best remembered because when we were freshmen we used to come to class only when he lectured. His classes were always overrun."[30] According to another of his students, the poet Marie Borroff, Maclean was considered a unique figure at the university because he came from a "wilderness outpost", was a gifted marksman with a rifle, played a rough game of handball and was every bit as much of an expert on George Armstrong Custer as he was on Aristotle.[31]

During World War II, Maclean declined a commission in the Office of 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.[32]

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?'"[33]

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens took a poetry class taught by Maclean at the University of Chicago and later called him, "the teacher to whom I am most indebted."[34]

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",[35] the latter describing a theory of tragedy that he revisited in his later work.

Retirement and Literary Career

After his retirement in 1973, Maclean began, as his children Jean and John had often encouraged him, to write down the stories he liked to tell.

As his father had urged, Maclean wrote an iconic and slightly fictionalized novella about his relationship with his parents and, even more so, with his brother Paul, beginning with their childhood together in Missoula and particularly focusing on the last summer in Montana before Paul's murder in 1938. According to his son, John Norman Maclean, "The portrait Norman managed to create in A River Runs through It gave Paul a lasting afterlife as the charming rebel, doomed but beautiful and gifted with a fly rod. He was forever the younger brother who struggled for an independent life and went down fighting. Norman's vision of him, though, brought the consolation of shared experience, taken to an eloquent level, to a host of brothers and sisters who have reached out to wayward siblings only to see them twist and dodge away as Paul did."[36] The resulting novella was included with two other stories in the book A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Pete Dexter, in a 1981 profile of Maclean in Esquire magazine, described the novella, "It is a story about Maclean and his brother, Paul, who was beaten to death with a gun butt in 1938. It is about not understanding what you love, about not being able to help. It is the truest story I ever read; it might be the best written. And to this day it won't leave me alone."[37]

The second story in the book is "Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'." The third story describes Maclean's employment as a teenager by the United States Forest Service and is titled "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky."[11] In 1976, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories became the first work of fiction ever published by the University of Chicago Press. The book received enthusiastic reviews, with Publishers Weekly calling it a "stunning debut."[38] It was nominated by a selection committee to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977 but no Pulitzer award was made in the category that year.

In a May 26, 1976, letter to

Chicago magazine.[40] Both essays were anthologized along with a selection of other short writings by Maclean, two interviews and "essays in appreciation and criticism" in the 1988 volume Norman Maclean.[41] They were collected again in The Norman Maclean Reader (2008).[42]

In a 1986 interview, Maclean expressed contempt for New York City publishers: "Not until recently have the Western writers ever gotten a good break from the publishers in New York."[43] He recalled that A River Runs Through It had been rejected by Alfred A. Knopf and that when Knopf later approached him about his second book, "I really told those bastards off" in a letter that was "probably one of the best things I ever wrote."[44] That 1981 "middle finger of a letter,"[45] to Knopf editor Charles Elliott, concludes, "if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole surviving author, that would mark the end of the world of books."[46] In that 1986 interview MacLean added, "I had the good fortune of having a dream come true. I'm sure every rejected writer must dream of a time when he's written something that was rejected which turns out to be quite successful, so that all the publishers who rejected him are now coming around and kissing his ass at high noon, and he can tell them where to go."[47]

By the time Maclean's A River Runs through It and Other Stories was published, he had begun researching a book about the 13 smokejumpers who lost their lives fighting the 1949 Mann Gulch Forest Fire.[48] Maclean's letters, some of them gathered in The Norman Maclean Reader, "attest to his periodic doubts as well as his determination to finish and publish the large manuscript he initially called 'The Great Blow-Up,' and later Young Men and Fire," according to the Reader's editor, O. Alan Weltzien.[42] That book was published posthumously in 1992 as Young Men and Fire by the University of Chicago Press and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Death

During his last years, Maclean collaborated with several others in attempting to adapt A River Runs Through It into a screenplay.[49] He also struggled to finish Young Men and Fire as his health declined,[50] and because "at the end he lived more for telling and retelling the story — for getting it right — than for publishing it."[51] Maclean died in Chicago on August 2, 1990, at the age of 87.[52] He left his manuscript of Young Men and Fire unfinished.[53] At his own request, Maclean's body was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the mountains of Montana.

Legacy

Maclean House (1991-2016), 5445 S. Ingleside Avenue

In 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, subsequently sold and turned into apartments.[54]

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.[55] Publishers Weekly gave the book a respectful review in the summer of 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.'"

Literary works

Books

Articles and essays

  • 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"[60] and (2) —in R.S. Crane's Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern[61]
  • 1956: "Personification But Not Poetry" in ELH: English Literary History Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1956), pp. 163–170.

Edited works

  • 1988: Norman Maclean (edited by Ron McFarland and Hugh Nichols)[62]
  • 2008: The Norman Maclean Reader (edited by O. Alan Weltzien)[63]

In popular culture

References

  1. ^ a b Norman Maclean (1976), A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, pages 27-28.
  2. ^ a b c John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 52.
  3. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 53.
  4. ^ "John Maclean | The Canadian Encyclopedia". www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca. Retrieved April 23, 2022.
  5. ^ a b John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 52-54.
  6. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 54-55.
  7. ^ Baumler, Ellen (July 11, 2012). "Montana Moments: Paul Maclean's Unsolved Murder". Montana Moments. Archived from the original on September 25, 2018. Retrieved September 25, 2018.
  8. ^ Kidston, Martin J. (July 9, 2000). "Paul MacLean in Helena". Independent Record. Helena, Montana. Retrieved April 28, 2020.
  9. ^ The Norman Maclean Reader, page 172.
  10. ^ Tribune Staff. "125 Montana Newsmakers: Norman F. Maclean". Great Falls Tribune. Archived from the original on March 10, 2012. Retrieved August 26, 2011.
  11. ^ a b A River Runs Through It Characters. Archived from the original on September 19, 2018. Retrieved September 19, 2018 – via www.bookrags.com.
  12. ^ "Norman Maclean and Me". Retrieved May 23, 2020.
  13. ^ a b The Norman Maclean Reader, page 179.
  14. ^ The Norman Maclean Reader. University of Chicago Press. Archived from the original on September 19, 2018. Retrieved September 19, 2018.
  15. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 49.
  16. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 136.
  17. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 150.
  18. ^ The Norman Maclean Reader, page 176.
  19. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 51.
  20. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, pages 50-51.
  21. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, pages 30-31.
  22. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 136.
  23. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, pages 151-153.
  24. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, pages 153-155.
  25. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, pages 155-156.
  26. ^ Norman Maclean (1976), A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, page 103.
  27. ^ Norman Maclean (1976), A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, pages 102-103.
  28. ^ Norman Maclean (1976), A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, page 104.
  29. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 157.
  30. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, page 137.
  31. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, pages 137-138.
  32. OCLC 573866
    .
  33. ^ Dexter, Pete (June 1981). "The Old Man and the River". Esquire. Archived from the original on July 9, 2014. Retrieved July 7, 2014.
  34. ^ "John Paul Stevens: By the Book". The New York Times. April 6, 2014. Archived from the original on October 1, 2015. Retrieved April 6, 2014.
  35. ^ "Norman Maclean, King Lear essay". Archived from the original on June 4, 2011. Retrieved March 28, 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  36. ^ John Norman Maclean (2021), Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, Custom House. Page 156.
  37. ^ Dexter, Pete (March 23, 2014) [June 1981]. "The Old Man and the River". Esquire. Retrieved July 7, 2014.
  38. ISBN 0917652711
    .
  39. ^ Maclean, Norman (2008). The Norman Maclean Reader. University of Chicago Press. p. 235.
  40. ISBN 0917652711
    .
  41. ISBN 0917652711
    .
  42. ^
    ISBN 9780226500270
    .
  43. ISBN 978-0-226-50026-3
    .
  44. ^ The Norman Maclean Reader, pages 177-178.
  45. ^ Moser, Whet. "Urban Remains: Norman Maclean Gives Alfred A. Knopf the Business". Chicago Magazine. Retrieved March 20, 2023.
  46. ^ "A Grudge Runs Through It". Harper's. No. February 1993. p. 35. Retrieved March 19, 2023.
  47. ^ The Norman Maclean Reader, page 178.
  48. ISBN 9780226500270
    .
  49. ^ The Norman Maclean Reader, pages 174-175.
  50. ISBN 0226500616
    .
  51. ^ Thomas, Alan (September 10, 2015). "The Achievement of Young Men and Fire". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  52. ^ C. Gerald Fraser (August 3, 1990). "Norman Maclean, 87, a Professor Who Wrote About Fly-Fishing". The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 27, 2016. Retrieved July 10, 2012.
  53. ISBN 0226500616
    .
  54. ^ "Blackstone, Maclean, Broadview to Become Apartments". www.chicagomaroon.com. Archived from the original on September 19, 2018. Retrieved September 19, 2018.
  55. ^ "A Brief Biography of Norman Maclean". A Brief Biography of Norman Maclean. University of Chicago Press. Retrieved March 20, 2023.
  56. ^ This work was originally Maclean's doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago
  57. ^ From Harper's Geoscience Series. (New York: Harper & Brothers), LCCN: UG470.M17
  58. ISBN 0-226-50066-7
  59. ISBN 0-226-50061-6
  60. ^ "Norman Maclean, King Lear essay". www.press.uchicago.edu. Archived from the original on March 20, 2018. Retrieved September 24, 2018.
  61. ^ The first essay is adapted from his 1940 doctoral dissertation and book The Theory of Lyric Poetry from the Renaissance to Coleridge, found on pp. 408–50 in Crane's work. The second is found on pp. 595–615. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) LCCN 57007903
  62. ISBN 0-917652-71-1
  63. ISBN 978-0-226-50026-3. Selections from his work plus previously unpublished material including letters and his writings on George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
    .
  64. ^ The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky. – IMDb.
  65. ^ Lisk, Jamie. – "The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky" Archived January 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. – CrankedOnCinema.com. – October 18, 2008.

External links

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