Fifty years ago this month, a slim novella was published not by some big New York City based publishing house to great fanfare but rather a university press in the city of Chicago. The author wasn’t a young man with the promise of a long writing career ahead of him. In fact, the author was in his 70s and was an academic, teaching literature for 45 years at the University of Chicago, which decided to publish his novella after it’d been declined by major publishers like Knopf in the regional hub of literature, New York. The decision to publish the book was a first for the university press, which normally dealt with academic and nonfiction texts. Their decision was also an attempt to offer a beloved professor an opportunity to fulfill his dream of becoming an author. At the age of 72, the son of a preacher raised in in the hinterlands of Missoula, Montana became a published author in 1975. Normal Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” would defy initial expectations for low readership and would require multiple reprints because it turns out this piece of “regional” fiction about fly fishing, family, and grief were themes readers hungered for, even if the story failed to take place in provincial New York.
The story, and later the film adapted by Robert Redford and starring a young Brad Pitt, not only changed the life of the septuagenarian Maclean, but also, Montana itself. The combination of the book and then the 1990 release of Redford’s film, occurring two years after Maclean’s death at the age of 87, elevated the story to bestseller status. It inspired an explosion of interest in fly fishing and drove tourists to Montana. But this wasn’t the first work of art to put Montana in the spotlight and nor would it be the last. The Blackfoot River became famous, with anglers flocking to the river hoping to land trout and this engagement also sounded the alarm. The Blackfoot was nearly an environmental catastrophe due to logging and mining pollution in the mid to late 1970s. The public’s devotion to the fishing holes on the Blackfoot was inspired by “A River Runs Through It” and led to a massive restoration of its watershed. In this case, the price of fame was worth it.
Many people learned of northwest Montana through Maclean’s writing and his depiction of a near-Eden like landscape that cradled faith, fishing, and family. To me, when I encountered the movie as a teenager and then later reading the book, I understood the story to be much richer and sadder than two young men daring rapids and ditching Bible lessons for the big catch. It was certainly an ode to a place that leaves the whole regionalism as low-brow art laughable, at best. Yes, it did give fishing a literary bent, elevating it into an art form and it also challenged traditional outdoor narratives where bravery and cunning skill was expected from the main character. What Maclean’s title did was offer a new way of understanding family ties, masculinity, grief, and despair in a new light. It’s didn’t follow the model set forth by Ernest Hemingway or any number of fishing tales in popular outdoors magazine. Addiction and suffering rose to the surface in the dwindling light of a summer’s day. Many of us who live in Montana have come to learn that sometimes our own hauntings, whether that’s from the loss of a loved one or the harsh realization that we can’t save anyone but ourselves, is best mediated through the rush of a river and the patience that comes from coming to know a landscape requires. We confront our sorrows and recall our joys in places that call our attention, requiring a reciprocity that often gets overlooked in places where subways and skyscrapers contain lives. We have Maclean to thank for showing us how think about our relationships to place and people in new terms, casting off old, outdated models of warped heroism or stoicism.
Fifty years ago “A River Runs Through It” certainly romanticized fly fishing, but it also at its heart is an enduring love story: to a family, and to Montana. Maclean’s late-in-life achievement is a legacy for us all.