Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, "A River Runs through It and Other Stories" now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.

Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences--the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.

By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, "A River Runs through It and Other Stories" has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."

"Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. . . . As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway."--Alfred Kazin, "Chicago Tribune Book World"

"It is an enchanted tale. . . . I have read the story three times now, and each time it seems fuller."-- Roger Sale, "New York Review of Books"

"Maclean's book--acerbic, laconic, deadpan--rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren. I love its sound."--James R. Frakes, "New York Times Book Review"

"The title novella is the prize. . . . Something unique and marvelous: a story that is at once an evocation of nature's miracles and realities and a probing of human mysteries. Wise, witty, wonderful, Maclean spins his tales, casts his flies, fishes the rivers and the woods for what he remembers from his youth in the Rockies."--"Publishers Weekly"

"Ostensibly a 'fishing story, ' 'A River Runs through It' is really an autobiographical elegy that captivates readers who have never held a fly rod in their hand. In it the art of casting a fly becomes a ritual of grace, a metaphor for man's attempt to move into nature."--Andrew Rosenheim, "The Independent"

諾曼•麥剋林恩

1902-1990

芝加哥大學文學教授，教授莎士比亞和浪漫派詩歌。退休後，年過七旬的他齣版瞭自傳性小說《一江流過水悠悠》，獲得意料之外的成功。該小說被提名1977年普利策小說奬，暢銷多年，如今已被認為是美國文學的不朽經典。1991年，芝大將一座改建的教堂建築命名為“麥剋林恩樓”。

陸榖孫

復旦大學英文教授，詞典編撰傢、散文傢、翻譯傢，主編有《英漢大詞典》、《漢英大詞典》等影響深遠的詞典多部，並有《餘墨集》、《餘墨二集》和《莎士比亞研究十講》等文集，《幼獅》、《星期一的故事》等譯著行世。1994年，他以最高票數獲選“復旦大學傑齣教授”。 《大河戀》是他的最新譯作。