“In Search of Good Water”

With Guest Author John N. Maclean

April 17th, 2024

The Maclean books that concern fly fishing, A River Runs through It and Home Waters, owe a heavy debt to Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” Those two books and the others by my father, Norman Maclean, and me, would have been written differently without the Hemingway story, which influenced both our styles. It’s even possible none of those books would have been written absent the story, though one hopes – as I certainly do – that’s taking matters too far. But it is true “Big Two-Hearted River” convinced my father and me< that fly fishing could be turned into literature in the right hands. That conviction has led me on a long chase, or quest, to find the places where Hemingway fished when he was young, on the trip that inspired the story, and when he was old and in need of the kind of solace Nick Adams, the story’s lone hero, found on that long ago trip. The quest led from the Fox River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to the abundant trout waters around Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway lived the last years of his life. I fished both places and came away, as fishermen often do, with more in the way of memories than fish, but with answers to questions as well.

John N. Maclean, the author of Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and A River and other books, wrote the foreword to Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River: The Centennial Edition, published last year by Mariner Classics. Maclean spent thirty years at the Chicago Tribune, most of that time as a Washington correspondent, before turning to an independent writing career three decades ago. Maclean, an avid fly fisherman, divides his time between Washington, DC, and a family cabin at Seeley Lake, Montana. The April 17th Chapter Meeting will be IN PERSON ONLY.

– Scott Cernich