One of my favourite opening lines in American literature — indeed, in all literature — is Norman Maclean’s in A River Runs Through It: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” If you’re as fond of his work as I am, you’ll be interested to know that a biography of the man is due to be published in May. Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers (University of Washington Press) has been written by Rebecca McCarthy, an award-winning reporter to whom Maclean was both friend and mentor while she was at the University of Chicago. She wrote about him in a piece published in The American Scholar magazine in 2019.