"A River Runs Through It" -- Fortyfive Years Later -- June 7, 2021

"A River Runs Through It." 

The Washington Post. Link here. 

I thought I had posted this. Maybe not.

From the linked article:

His son, John N. Maclean, is also an author, and his latest book, “Home Waters,” is a lyrical companion to his father’s classic, chronicling their family’s history and bond with Montana’s Blackfoot River. His storytelling — from the fishing with his dad to the life and death of his Uncle Paul — is reliable, elegant and charming.

After a 30-year career as a journalist, mostly as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in D.C., the younger Maclean took to writing well-received nonfiction about wildfires in the American West. He hadn’t considered a family memoir.

hen, he caught a big trout — a really big trout — while fishing a stretch of the Blackfoot that his father memorialized in “A River Runs Through It,” published in 1976. He wrote about that fish, “the fish of a lifetime,” he called it, for a local club of anglers, and then, with some prodding, expanded the tale for a regional magazine. That was the end of it, he thought, until a couple years later when an editor unearthed the magazine article while on vacation in Montana. Did Maclean want to write a book?

“I thought this was going to be a big fish story, but then it turned into something very different,” says Maclean, now 78. “I don’t call it a memoir. I call it a chronicle. A memoir is about you, and this isn’t all about me.”