A river runs through it and other stories

Norman Maclean's collection appeared in 1976, and it was the first work of fiction the University of Chicago Press had ever published. It holds a novella and two short stories, both of which are set before the events of the novella.

The two shorter pieces are Logging and Pimping and Your pal, Jim and USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky. The novella that gives the book its title is a semi-autobiographical account of Maclean and his brother Paul, and of the family they grew up in in early twentieth-century Montana, where, in the book's own words, religion and fly fishing were never clearly separated from one another.

The collection was widely praised when it came out, and in 1977 it was put forward for the Pulitzer Prize in Letters, though no award was made in the category that year. Since then two of the pieces have been filmed, and the book is usually read as one of the finest accounts of a family and a place in American writing.