31 Facts About Norman Maclean

Norman Fitzroy Maclean was an American professor at the University of Chicago who, following his retirement, became a major figure in American literature.

Norman Maclean's great-grandfather, Laughlan Norman Maclean, was a carpenter who, accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth Campbell, emigrated to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1821, before they settled on a homestead in Pictou County.

Maclean's father, Rev John Norman Maclean, was born on July 28,1862, to Laughlan's son Norman and his wife Mary MacDonald on the family farm in Marshy Hope, Pictou County, Nova Scotia where much of the community spoke Canadian Gaelic.

Norman Maclean's maternal grandfather, John Davidson, was a Presbyterian immigrant from Northern England who had first settled near Argenteuil, Laurentides, Quebec, where his daughter Clara was born.

In 1893, John Norman Maclean completed advanced studies at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister.

Norman Maclean was a minister, and every morning after breakfast we had what was called family worship.

When Norman Maclean was 14 years old, he found work with the United States Forest Service in the Bitterroot National Forest of northwestern Montana.

Norman Maclean later attended Dartmouth College, where he served as editor-in-chief of the humor magazine the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern.

Norman Maclean stated that he learned an enormous amount from Frost, which he carried with him for the rest of his life.

Norman Maclean received his Bachelor of Arts in 1924 and chose to remain in Hanover, New Hampshire, to serve as an instructor until 1926, a time he recalled in "This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon: A Few Remarks on the Art of Teaching".

Norman Maclean tried pouring water in, only to have the water freeze as well.

Norman Maclean then started hiking through the blizzard to seek help but soon found that the car had caught up with him, as the cold had prevented the engine from overheating.

Norman Maclean felt foolish, but Jessie always considered him the hero of the blizzard.

Norman Maclean was gay and loved life wherever she lived.

Norman Maclean really worked me over in our early years in Chicago.

Norman Maclean made me see how beautiful it was, made me see the geometric and industrial and architectural beauty.

Norman Maclean said less than she knew, but what she said was enough and she said it with humor, with literary allusions and with simplicity.

Norman Maclean suggested all of these addictions and behaviors had a very long generational history and could be traced all the way back to the Norman Maclean family's earliest origins among the Gaels of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland.

Norman Maclean was attacked and brutally beaten at Sixty-Third Street and Drexel Avenue in Chicago.

Norman Maclean accompanied his brother's casket, alone, on an overnight train trip from Chicago to Montana.

Norman Maclean began graduate studies in English at the University of Chicago in 1928 and earned a PhD in 1940.

Lewis, Norman Maclean acquired a reputation for personal magnetism and for making the writings of difficult Medieval authors like Francois Rabelais and Geoffrey Chaucer come alive in the lecture hall.

Norman Maclean is best remembered because when we were freshmen we used to come to class only when he lectured.

Norman Maclean eventually became the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of English and taught the Romantic poets and Shakespeare.

Norman Maclean wrote two scholarly articles, "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century" and "Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear", the latter describing a theory of tragedy that he revisited in his later work.

Norman Maclean was forever the younger brother who struggled for an independent life and went down fighting.

Maclean's letters, some of them gathered in The Norman Maclean Reader, "attest to his periodic doubts as well as his determination to finish and publish the large manuscript he initially called 'The Great Blow-Up,' and later Young Men and Fire," according to the Reader's editor, O Alan Weltzien.

Norman Maclean died in Chicago on August 2,1990, at the age of 87.

Norman Maclean left his manuscript of Young Men and Fire unfinished.

At his own request, Norman Maclean's body was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the mountains of Montana.

The anthology included parts of a never-finished book about George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn which Norman Maclean had worked on from 1959 to 1963.