Thomas McGuane
By:
December 11, 2014
Novelist and angler THOMAS McGUANE (born 1939) is a writer of extensive gifts who sings about fractured human lives with toughness and compassion. But he is forever associated with the hunting and fishing — especially fishing — that have marked his leisure hours since boyhood. Like Hemingway, McGuane finds life lessons and manhood-tutorials scattered across the sere terrain of field and sparkling lights of stream. His fishing writing is superlative, collected in The Longest Silence (2000), among other places, and has elevated him to the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame (an obscure but lofty honour for those of us who are also Brothers of the Angle). His fiction, from the youthful first novel, The Sporting Club (1969), to the Key West masterpiece Ninety-two in the Shade (1973) and the masterly Montana-based short-story collection Gallatin Canyon (2006), sketches the imperfect lines of people who can never quite capture, off the water, the perfect grace of throwing a number-18 pale morning dun with a three-weight Sage rod, while standing in three feet of rushing water. McGuane’s own middle years, full of Hollywood carousing and tumultuous relationships with actresses Elizabeth Ashley and Margot Kidder, have lately settled into the saner rhythms available to those who live in the god’s-country region of Montana known as Paradise Valley. Lucky him.
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On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Maila Nurmi, H.C. Westermann.
READ MORE about members of the Anti-Anti-Utopian Generation (1934-43).