“I would argue that without ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ all the Maclean books would have been written differently,” Maclean said. “I would argue further, and could never prove, that none of the Maclean books might ever have been written without ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’”

Son of famed author Norman MacLean who penned the 1976 semi-autobiographical novella “A River Runs Through It,” about a family where “there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” the younger Maclean discussed how Hemingway’s work became a touchstone for his father and himself during a presentation at the Ravalli County Museum in Hamilton on Tuesday night. An award winning author and journalist, Maclean has written five books on wildland fires and released a memoir in 2021 titled “Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River.” 

Maclean also wrote the forward for the recently released centennial edition of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” He described it as a special present he received for his 80th birthday, the kind “that you don’t even dream about.”

“I shared a byline on a book with Ernest Hemingway,” Maclean said. “I’ve been in the writing game for 60 years. Ernest Hemingway had big effect on me, and to think that that might ever happen to somebody, you don’t even dream of that one. The reason that was so important is that the first time I read the story, ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ I was about 14 years old, and my dad gave it to me because he and I both lived a schizophrenic existence.”

They spent their summers in Montana at a cabin in Seeley Lake built by Maclean’s grandfather and his family, which they still own to this day. During the school year, the family would go back to Chicago where his father, Norman, taught at the University of Chicago. The worlds were so far apart that Maclean had a great deal of trouble trying to bring them together as a boy, and never felt like he fully succeeded.

“For my dad, I think it was perhaps even more acute,” he said.

The two read the story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” together. Even as a young teen, Maclean was shocked by how the story brought fishing to life.

“It didn’t just say here’s how you tie a clench knot or here’s how you choose a royal coachman, it showed you what it really felt like to be out there and to fight a fish, a big fish, and to loose ’em,” he said. “In most of the fishing stories in outdoor mags, you catch them and it’s 3 inches bigger than your buddy’s. ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ is not like that. ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ goes to the heart of the game.”

Maclean discussed how he and his father talked about the book, and tried to figure out what was going on in the story that made it so “magic.”

“One of the things he told me, which registered with him at the time more than registered with me, was that this story, ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ shows you that our sport, fly fishing, can be literature. It can be noble literature — and he kept that idea for decades.”

Maclean described how he saw that same quality in his father’s work when he read “A River Runs Through It” for the first time, when it was still in draft form prior to publication. Upon finishing, he told his father it was “the most authentic thing about fishing I’ve read since ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ and the most beautiful prose I’ve read since Shakespeare.”

“The story of ‘A River Runs Through It’ depends on a belief that my father was creating literature,” Maclean said. “He wouldn’t have done it otherwise. He believed in noble prose, and to have fly fishing reach for nobility was something that Ernest Hemingway accomplished in ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’”

Not only do the two books share tales of fishing and the outdoors, the stories also share larger themes of personal restoration and spiritual rehabilitation found through the practice — themes the younger Maclean touches on in his book “Home Waters” as well.

“That is the theme of ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ the restoration of feeling by fishing,” he said. “Everybody in this room who has had a rod in their hand knows what that feels like.”

After a long career in writing, including multiple books and 30 years with the Chicago Tribune, Maclean says he isn’t interested in writing another big book. These days his love of fly fishing has led him to a cause — conservation.

Maclean has spoken out about the dangers of pollution, over-fishing and “loving our rivers to death.” He has also been an outspoken supporter of the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act, a bill that would add nearly 80,000 acres to the Bob Marshall, Scapegoat, and Mission Mountains wilderness areas and safeguard four crucial tributaries of the Blackfoot River, helping to sustain the health of native trout populations and wildlife along the storied waters where four generations of Maclean’s family have drawn timeless lessons from.

“I’ve lived an independent life,” he said. “But I do remember things that my father said, and one of the things he said was it is a privilege of old age to speak for the land.”