Essays on A River Runs Through It: Bringing a Classic to the Screen

Norman Maclean was a professor of English at the University of Chicago, who in his later years wrote an extraordinary autobiography, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, which recounts his upbringing in a large family in the Rockies of Montana, his years as a young man in the world of fly-fishing, and his return to the West after World War II to teach at the university and to grapple with the death of his brother, Paul. The book was published in 1976 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1977. The film rights were purchased shortly thereafter by Robert Redford, who announced that he would direct the film, with the script to be written by his friend, the novelist Richard Russo.