Норман Маклин: Американдық жазушының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American author (1902–1990)
the American author

Norman Fitzroy Maclean (December 23, 1902August 2, 1990) was an American professor at the University of Chicago who, following his retirement, became a major figure in American literature. Maclean is best known for his Hemingwayesque writing, his collection of novellas A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976), and the creative nonfiction book Young Men and Fire (1992).

In his novella, A River Runs Through It, Maclean wrote that his paternal ancestors were from the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. According to his son, however, their paternal ancestors were Gaelic speaking Presbyterians and from the Isle of Coll, which is "located about seven miles west of the Clan MacLean stronghold, the Isle of Mull". Maclean's great grandfather, Laughlan 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 completed his education at Dalhousie College in Halifax and at Manitoba College in Winnipeg. MacLean's parents met while his father was riding circuit in the summers among the many small Presbyterian congregations in the pioneer communities of the Pembina Valley Region of Manitoba. His mother, Clara Davidson was a schoolmarm. 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. Finding the farmland there poor, John Davidson and his family moved west by oxcart and settled on a homestead at New Haven near Manitou, Manitoba.

Maclean was born at Clarinda, Iowa, on December 23, 1902, and was the son of Clara Evelyn (; 1873–1952) and the Rev. John Norman Maclean (1862–1941). Maclean and his younger brother, Paul Davidson MacLean (1906–1938) were homeschooled by their father until 1913. Maclean recalled about being homeschooled by his father, "I think the most important thing is that he read aloud to us. He was a minister, and every morning after breakfast we had what was called family worship. We'd all sit with our breakfast chairs pulled back from the table and he would read to us from the Bible or from some religious poet. He was a very good reader that was very good for me because in doing that, he would bring out the rhythms of the Bible. That reading instilled in me this great love of rhythm in language." His father also passed on to both of his sons a passion for fly fishing which he had begun and developed in Clarinda. As a child, Maclean also often witnessed his father, whose first language was Canadian Gaelic, working hard to learn Canadian English diction and elocution. In 1909, his family relocated to Missoula, Montana, at the invitation of its Presbyterian church elders. The following years considerably influenced and inspired Maclean's writings, appearing prominently in the short story The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers (1977) and the semi autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976).

When Maclean was 14 years old, he found work with the United States Forest Service in the Bitterroot National Forest of northwestern Montana. The novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky and the story "Black Ghost" in Young Men and Fire (1992) are semi fictionalized accounts of these experiences.

Maclean later attended Dartmouth College, where he served as editor in chief of the humor magazine the Dartmouth Jack O Lantern. His successor as editor in chief was Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss who, Maclean described as "the craziest guy I ever met." He was also a member of the Sphinx and Beta Theta Pi. During a 1986 interview, Maclean described the enormous gratitude he felt for having been able to attend creative writing classes taught at Dartmouth by the poet Robert Frost. Maclean stated that he learned an enormous amount from Frost, which he carried with him for the rest of his life. During the same interview, Maclean recalled that his lifelong admiration for and emulation of the writing style of Ernest Hemingway also began during his time at Dartmouth.

Maclean met his future wife, Jessie Burns, during a December party in the Helena valley. They were returning home after the party with another couple in Jessie's car, when a blizzard descended and the car's radiator froze. He tried pouring water in, only to have the water freeze as well. He 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. He felt foolish, but Jessie always considered him the hero of the blizzard. He and Burns married on September 24, 1931, and had two children: a daughter Jean (born in 1942), now a lawyer, and a son, John Norman Maclean (born in 1943) who became a journalist and author. Following their marriage, Jessie handled the family's finances and wrote all the checks. Jessie's "open personality" made her a lot of friends at the University of Chicago. It was often said of her in later years, "She was the only one who'd talk to the young faculty wives." During a 1986 interview, Maclean recalled, "I love Chicago. My wife was very wonderful in helping me come to feel that. I was very provincial in a lot of ways. She was gay and loved life wherever she lived. She really worked me over in our early years in Chicago. I was insolent and provincial about that city. She made me see how beautiful it was, made me see the geometric and industrial and architectural beauty." Dr. Sidney Schulman later said of Jessie's role at the university, "Jessie knew what was to be said. She said less than she knew, but what she said was enough and she said it with humor, with literary allusions and with simplicity. She came to be a sort of housemother. In being this, she was unaware of it no self satisfied awareness that what she was doing was noble. She was not playacting. It was part of her existence." Jessie died in 1968, of emphysema and cancer of the esophagus, the result of decades of chain smoking. Maclean's family always led two lives, according to his son. One life was during the summers at the log cabin built by Maclean's father near Seeley Lake, Montana. The other life took place in Chicago during the academic year. Maclean gave up typing and wrote almost everything, including his books, "in a cramped longhand that generations of typists at the University and elsewhere prided themselves on learning to decipher."

Maclean began graduate studies in English at the University of Chicago in 1928 and earned a PhD in 1940. Like his contemporary C. S. Lewis, Maclean acquired a reputation for personal magnetism and for making the writings of difficult Medieval authors like François Rabelais and Geoffrey Chaucer come alive in the lecture hall. One of his students later said, "Maclean is one of the best liked guys around this place. He is best remembered because when we were freshmen we used to come to class only when he lectured. His classes were always overrun." According to another of his students, the poet Marie Borroff, Maclean was considered a unique figure at the university because he came from a "wilderness outpost", was a gifted marksman with a rifle, played a rough game of handball and was every bit as much of an expert on George Armstrong Custer as he was on Aristotle. During World War II, Maclean declined a commission in the Office of Naval Intelligence to serve as dean of students. During the war, he also served as director of the Institute on Military Studies and co authored Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs. Maclean eventually became the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of English and taught the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. "Every year I said to myself, 'You better teach this bastard so you don't forget what great writing is like.' I taught him technically, two whole weeks for the first scene from Hamlet. I'd spend the first day on just the line, 'Who's there?'" U. S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens took a poetry class taught by Maclean at the University of Chicago and later called him, "the teacher to whom I am most indebted." Maclean also 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.