Every Version of A River Runs Through It

The story that crossed from memoir to myth

Norman Maclean spent most of his life not writing fiction. He was a University of Chicago English professor, a teacher of Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, a man who had watched his younger brother Paul die young and violently and had spent decades carrying that. He was 73 when the University of Chicago Press published A River Runs Through It and Other Stories in 1976, the first work of original fiction the press had ever published. The novella is autobiographical in the way that only late-life reckonings can be: a Montana boyhood, a Presbyterian minister father who taught his sons fly-fishing as a form of prayer, and a brother whose gift with a rod was matched only by his talent for self-destruction. The book arrived quietly, then grew into something larger, passed hand to hand among readers who recognized in it something true about family love and helplessness.

For sixteen years it existed only on the page. Then Robert Redford, who had spent his own formative years in the West, acquired the rights and made the film that most people know. After that, the story largely stayed in those two forms: the book and the movie. It is not a franchise, not a universe, not a property that has been sequelled or serialized. What adaptations exist are mostly theatrical and educational, works that found the material stageworthy or teachable. The novella and the film form a rare case where the adaptation does not crowd out the source but lives alongside it, each doing something the other cannot.