Maclean wrote A River Runs Through It and Other Stories after his retirement from the University of Chicago in 1973. He spent his career teaching a paradoxical truth not found in most books: that the intellectual life is immensely important and yet supremely unimportant when set beside the task of ordinary living. Perhaps this is why, though he was a superb scholar, Maclean never wrote a scholarly book. They bring too much order to life’s messiness. Even at their best, we learned from him, books have an indirect relation to life.

Yet for all his passion and insight as a teacher, Maclean made it evident that, compared to the rough places of Montana, the university is a highly artificial and extremely privileged place. His youthful experiences amid the Montana forests and mountains and rivers enabled him to dwell within Wordsworth’s poetry and to reveal its real power. Maclean was an excellent teacher of Wordsworth. Yet beneath the tough secular hide was an unmistakably religious heart. It was clear that he had seen and heard and done things in his Montana youth that had marked him for life-things that had turned him into a skeptical and somewhat hard-bitten man. But I suspected that these were the most important facts. Maclean revealed little more than bare facts: that he grew up in Montana, that he was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and that he had lapsed from the faith of his father. Without talking much about his own life, he taught life-truths. And he taught truths not usually found in texts. Norman Maclean was not my best teacher, but he was certainly the most memorable.

Paul mclean a river runs through it