The following was publishing in UChicago News on November 11, 2024.

By Laura Demanski

The late Norman Maclean was many things: the most decorated teacher of undergraduates in UChicago history; author of the first original work of fiction published by the University of Chicago Press; and a sage to literary-minded anglers the world over.

Until now, however, Maclean, PhD’40, was not the subject of a biography. Rebecca McCarthy, AB’77, has changed that with the publication of Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers (University of Washington Press).

It feels overdue for such a figure. At UChicago his three Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching are unmatched. Thirty-four years after his death, his iconic book (1976) continues in print, with more than a million copies sold. The title novella’s status as a modern classic was further cemented by Robert Redford’s acclaimed 1992 film adaptation.

McCarthy brought to her task all the usual biographer’s methods, speaking to scores of sources and combing her subject’s papers, down to the notes he kept as secretary of his condo board. But she also wrote from personal experience.

She first met Maclean while visiting her brother in Seeley Lake, Montana, Maclean’s summer retreat. The 16-year-old McCarthy impressed Maclean with her poetic talent, and he took her under his wing, reading her work, offering candid but encouraging critiques, and talking her out of vague plans to attend the University of Montana. The place for her, Maclean counseled, was the University of Chicago. “A strong, powerful woman like yourself, a poet, they would love you,” she remembers him saying.

“What I didn’t know then,” she writes in the book, “was that only the previous year, Norman had been hospitalized a few months for depression.” Soon after his wife Jessie died from cancer in 1968, Maclean retired from teaching and could not foresee the literary success to come. In retrospect, McCarthy writes: “I think I helped Norman continue to feel healthy because I was an eager young person he could encourage and influence. I was a project.”

She did come to the University of Chicago, where the two became friends.

Known as an inspiring teacher of undergraduates—inspiring both love and fear—Maclean published no scholarly books and only a few articles. Holding himself to the impossibly high standards set by his exacting father, he spent a career searching for the story that could realize his ambitions. He found it at last, McCarthy shows, in A River Runs Through It.

When he finished the novella, “he knew it was fabulous,” she said at a reading in Chicago this May. “He didn’t need anyone to tell him.” Read more from McCarthy’s conversation discussing her writing of Maclean’s biography in the edited Q&A below:

How did you come to undertake this book?

I was good friends with Gwin Kolb, a close friend and colleague of Norman’s. And Gwin told me: “Becky, you need to start interviewing all the English department faculty before they die. You must write about Norman. You used to fight fires, you lived in Montana. You can do it.”

So I started interviewing: John Wallace; Ned Rosenheim and Peggy Rosenheim, JD’49; Wayne Booth, AM’47, PhD’50; David Bevington. I mean, anybody. William Veeder; Robert von Hallberg; Joe Williams; Frank Kinahan; Richard Stern. And they said: “You need to talk to so-and-so,” and I would talk to so-and-so in a different department. And then those folks would suggest others.

At the suggestion of Joel Snyder, SB’61, professor emeritus of art history and Norman Maclean’s son-in-law, I ran a notice in the alumni magazine, telling readers what I was doing. I got a deluge of mail and phone calls from, I would say, 50 to 100 people. And they all wanted to talk about Mr. Maclean. His class was the only thing that people who finished in the 1930s still remembered. You know, “he saved my life and changed my life,” just all these testimonials.

In researching the book, you went everywhere—to Clarinda, Iowa, where Norman and his parents once lived; to Norman and his brother Paul’s college, Dartmouth; to Missoula and Seeley Lake, Montana; and to the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in Chicago, to name a few. How did you craft all you learned into a narrative?

It was just little by little—accretion, getting all the information. And then I thought, I’ve got to fish or cut bait. I just started writing. I wrote a version that was chronological. The University of Washington Press sent it out to the first reader, and they said, “Oh, this has a lot of information.” The second reader just excoriated it. I mean, it was not helpful. It was hurtful. But I put that aside and talked to my friend Daryl Koehn, AB’77, AM’83, PhD’91, who has written many books, and I let her see what the person had written. She said, “Why don’t you take some of the suggestions? Even in this pile of [expletive], there might be a few pearls, right?”

So I did. And I just thought, you know what, I’m not going to write a biography, I’m going to tell a story. So people can see Norman and hear Norman and understand how he moved through the world and how he treated other people.

Norman had a lot of students who were tucked under his wing. I wasn’t the only one. Yeah, I was the only one who had fought fires in Montana, and lived in Montana, and knew Seeley Lake. But there were many other students. Bill Harmon, AB’58, AM’68, was one, and he was the longtime head of the English department at Chapel Hill. Ken Pierce, AB’63, AM’67, who wrote for the Village Voice. There are many people who were successful who Norman had nurtured in some way.

And so, when I started rewriting the book, at first I thought, I can’t. It was too much for me. So I backed up from the first version and then just shone a light on him. At first the book is me showing you him. And then it’s just him being him.

—Adapted from a story that first appeared in the University of Chicago Magazine. Read it in its entirety, along with an excerpt of McCarthy’s biography here.