I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

Selections from his work plus previously unpubliNorman Macleand material including letters and his writings on George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Norman Fitzroy Maclean (December 23 1902 – August 2 1990) was an American author and scholar noted for his books A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976) and Young Men and Fire (1992). Too young to enlist in the military during World War I Maclean worked in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service in what is now the Bitterroot National Forest of northwestern Montana.