Norman Maclean, 87; Author, Professor

Norman Maclean, a University of Chicago professor of English who wrote the highly acclaimed work of fiction “A River Runs Through It” as a septuagenarian, has died. He was 87.

He had been in poor health for the last year.

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing,” is the opening line of Maclean’s 1976 three-part anthology. Begun when he was 70, retired and recently widowed, the book describes Maclean’s youth in Montana, fly-fishing with his brother and Presbyterian minister father, logging and working for the U.S. Forest Service.

The book was selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury of 1977 as the year’s best work of fiction, but the choice was rejected by the Pulitzer advisory board.

Maclean, however, told a Times reporter in 1986 that he cared little for the Pulitzer he never won. Instead, he was proud that the book had earned the Dan & Helen Bailey Award for carrying on the ideals of that noted fly-fishing couple.

Maclean was pursued for several years by Hollywood producers, actors and film students eager to turn the book into a movie. His son-in-law, Joel Snyder, whose photographs of Montana’s Blackfoot River appear in the book, said this week that Robert Redford has purchased the movie rights. Academy Award-winning actor William Hurt once traveled to Montana to fish with Maclean, asking the author at the end of the outing if he fished well enough to portray Maclean’s brother, the fly-fishing expert, in a film.

“Well, Bill, you’re a pretty good fisherman but not good enough to be my brother,” the author told the actor.

The negotiations took years because of Maclean’s insistence that a film not trivialize the book, which he considered “a love poem to my family.”

“I’m not going to allow my story to be reduced to a stereotyped Western,” Maclean told The Times four years ago. “Nobody’s going to touch it unless I can control it--and be sure it’s not changed and my family is not degraded.”

Maclean had completed a second book of fiction, “Young Men and Fire” based on a 1949 incident in which 13 smoke jumpers from the U.S. Forest Service perished in a Montana forest fire. That book has not yet been published.

Reared in Montana, Maclean and his brother were taught at home by their father. Mornings were for study and afternoons were for fishing and hunting.

Until a few years ago, Maclean continued to spend summers at the isolated Montana cabin he helped his father build in 1922.

“His life was divided between being a western tough guy and a Chicago intellectual,” his son, John, of Chicago, said after Maclean’s death.

Maclean was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago, teaching there from 1930 to 1973. He earned his Ph.D. there in 1940 and three times received the Quantrell Prize for excellence in teaching undergraduates.

As a teacher, Maclean wrote two nonfiction books, “A Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs” and “The Theory of Lyric Poetry from the Renaissance to Coleridge.”

Maclean’s wife, Jessie, died in 1968. He is survived by his son, a daughter, Jean Maclean Snyder, and four grandchildren.