Norman Maclean Didn’t Publish Much. What He Did Contains Everything

That comes to two and a half books. Add to them a handful of lectures, essays, and sketches, most written or resurrected in the flurry of sudden, late-in-life fame, and you have Maclean’s entire literary output. You could read it all in a single day, yet it contains almost everything there is to know about what the English language can do. Are you trying to deploy a fact in a non-boring way? Consider this, on the geology of the Blackfoot River Valley: “The boulders on the flat were shaped by the last ice age only eighteen or twenty thousand years ago, but the red and green precambrian rocks beside the blue water were almost from the basement of the world and time.” Are you trying to find a new way to describe an old familiar thing? Consider this, on afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains: “By three-thirty or four, the lightning would be flexing itself on the distant ridges like a fancy prizefighter, skipping sideways, ducking, showing off but not hitting anything.” Are you trying to find a beginning for a story? Consider this, the opening line of “Young Men and Fire”: “In 1949 the Smokejumpers were not far from their origins as parachute jumpers turned stunt performers dropping from the wings of planes at county fairs just for the hell of it plus a few dollars, less hospital expenses.” That is a fly fisherman’s prose, spinning in glittering circles overhead before landing exactly where it must, for a story that is running headlong toward mortal danger.