Norman Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the 20th 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, cardsharps 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 elegaic, these are 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 for 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.