Thomas McGuane
Encyclopedia
Thomas Francis McGuane III (born December 11, 1939) is an American author. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors.
, Michigan
, the son of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic parents who moved to the Midwest from Massachusetts
. His primary education included boarding school at Cranbrook School
in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
, from which he graduated in 1958, but also included work on a ranch in Wyoming
, ubiquitous fishing and hunting, and a difficult relationship with his alcoholic father that would later shadow much of his fiction. McGuane prefers to consider his roots matrilineal, on which side he is descended from a rich storytelling clan.
He envisioned himself as a writer from a very young age, admiring what he perceived as the adventurous life of a writer as much as the prospect of writing. He began a serious devotion to writing by the age of 16.
(B.A., 1962, English), where he met his lifelong friend Jim Harrison
. At Yale University
(M.F.A., 1965), he studied playwriting and dramatic literature, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University
(1966–67) provided him the time and resources to finish his first published novel, The Sporting Club
(published in 1969 with the assistance of Harrison). The Sporting Club is an anarchic portrayal of aristocratic decline and eventual ruin at an elite Michigan outdoor club. McGuane wrote the novel in a frenetic six weeks after his initial hopes for a published novel in The Dial were dashed by its editor at the time, E. L. Doctorow
.
Upon completing his Stegner Fellowship, McGuane and his wife, Rebecca Portia Crockett, moved to Livingston, Montana
, and when the screen rights to The Sporting Club were purchased, he invested the funds (wisely) in ranch property in Montana’s Paradise Valley. His second novel, The Bushwhacked Piano, a picaresque comedy chronicling the romantic, sporting, and entrepreneurial hijinks of Nicholas Payne, traipsing from Michigan to Montana to Florida and sprinkled with wry commentary on the current state of America throughout, appeared in 1971 to rave reviews. Jonathan Yardley
in the New York Times hailed the 31-year-old McGuane as “a talent of Faulknerian
potential,” and Saul Bellow
described McGuane as “a language star.” The novel won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
McGuane’s third novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), was received as continued confirmation of his potential and is perhaps his best known, or at least his most widely acclaimed in literary circles. Shoving off with the ominous invocation, “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic,” the novel utilizes young Thomas Skelton’s desire to be a Key West
fishing guide as a foil for numerous expressions of word-drunk cultural, familial, and macho angst, culminating in the death of Skelton at the business end of rival guide Nichol Dance’s pistol.
Ninety-Two in the Shade was nominated for a National Book Award
, and it represents the close of the first chapter in McGuane’s public literary life, a closing that may have also coincided with a transforming crash of his Porsche on an icy Texas highway. The crash left him without serious injury but speechless for several days, and he resolved to shed his monastic obsession with writing novels and to assume a new lease on life, a resolution substantially assisted by Hollywood’s offering of lucrative screenwriting opportunities.
Thus began the interlude in McGuane’s career when he became known as “Captain Berserko” and authored screenplays for “Rancho Deluxe” (1973), shot in Livingston, Montana; “The Missouri Breaks” (1976), starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando; and McGuane’s foray into directing with the film version of “92 in the Shade” (1975).
The excesses of those years are reflected – though hardly in full – by McGuane’s tumultuous affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley
(captured in voyeuristic detail in her memoir, Actress), his divorce from his first wife Becky Crockett, (who went on to marry Peter Fonda) his marriage to actress Margot Kidder
, the birth of their daughter, Maggie (herself an author), and by his second divorce, all in the span of less than a year.
Emerging from the flaming wreck of celebrity, only a few years after the flaming wreck of his Porsche, McGuane published his most autobiographical novel, Panama, in 1978. His first and, until Driving On the Rim (2010), only novel written in the first person, it is the story of a flash-in-the-pan rock star named Chet Pomeroy who suffers delusion after delusion and can only imagine salvation in the character of Catherine, a literary embodiment of McGuane’s feelings toward his third wife, Laurie Buffett, sister of Jimmy Buffett
, one of McGuane’s Key West comrades. The novel was mercilessly panned by critics as self-absorbed and a testament to wasted literary talent – notwithstanding McGuane’s protests that he considered it his best novel and that he was intentionally creating a lugubrious character who was not entitled, in the common view, to his feelings of loss and depression.
An ongoing struggle has ensued between McGuane and his reviewers concerning their expectations for his fiction, and their sense of how much McGuane-the-celebrity was intruding upon his work. The upheaval of the period concluded with the deaths of McGuane’s father, mother, and sister in the span of 30 months, and by McGuane’s admission that he felt no desire to author a comic novel like any of his first three works.
McGuane is quick to point out, however, that unlike these protagonists, he has been happily married to Laurie Buffett since the late '70s and, in the estimation of one Montana friend (William Kittredge), has a “genius for living well,” the prescription for which seems to include ample family time, reading, writing, cutting horses, and flyfishing, all transpiring in the breathtaking Boulder River valley near McLeod, Montana
, where McGuane has moved his ranch from Paradise Valley, Montana.
Among the later novels, Nothing But Blue Skies stands out as offering the broadest expression of McGuane’s thoughts on life in America and the American West. A hangover from the counterculture lingers, as does disillusionment over economic ambition. The West, perhaps, provides more opportunities for refuge from it all, though the refuge is diminishing every day. Still there are those who worship the “god of handsome land” (McGuane plainly among them) and try their best to understand the interpersonal shortcomings and cynicism of the locals, having faith that many of them are genuinely decent and commendable.
While the whole of McGuane’s fiction has only sporadic episodes of serenity and hopefulness – with Nothing But Blue Skies being one of the most hopeful novels -- Larry McMurtry
has observed that McGuane’s nonfiction writing displays a markedly contrasting inner peace and natural spirituality. McGuane’s paean
s to fly fishing (The Longest Silence), horses (Some Horses) and his life in the outdoors (An Outside Chance) capture his belief in the redeeming potential of nature and sporting ritual, and are widely considered among the finest writing in those genres.
of the 1960s and 1970s, and an increasing devotion to family relationships and relationships with the natural world in the changing American West, primarily Montana
, where he has made his home since 1968, and where his last five novels and many of his essays are set.
Non-fiction
Early life
McGuane was born in WyandotteWyandotte, Michigan
Wyandotte is a city in Wayne County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 25,883 at the 2010 census, a decrease of 7.6% from 2000. Wyandotte is located in southeastern Michigan, approximately south of Detroit on the Detroit River, and is part of the collection of communities known as...
, Michigan
Michigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
, the son of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic parents who moved to the Midwest from Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
. His primary education included boarding school at Cranbrook School
Cranbrook Schools
Cranbrook Schools is a private, PK–12 school located on a campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The schools comprise a co-educational elementary school, a middle school with separate schools for boys and girls, and a co-educational high school with boarding facilities...
in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Bloomfield Hills is a city in Oakland County of the U.S. state of Michigan, northwest of downtown Detroit. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 3,869...
, from which he graduated in 1958, but also included work on a ranch in Wyoming
Wyoming
Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...
, ubiquitous fishing and hunting, and a difficult relationship with his alcoholic father that would later shadow much of his fiction. McGuane prefers to consider his roots matrilineal, on which side he is descended from a rich storytelling clan.
He envisioned himself as a writer from a very young age, admiring what he perceived as the adventurous life of a writer as much as the prospect of writing. He began a serious devotion to writing by the age of 16.
Writing career
He attended University of MichiganUniversity of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
(B.A., 1962, English), where he met his lifelong friend Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison
James "Jim" Harrison is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and writings about food. He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway...
. At Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
(M.F.A., 1965), he studied playwriting and dramatic literature, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
(1966–67) provided him the time and resources to finish his first published novel, The Sporting Club
The Sporting Club
The Sporting Club is the 1969 debut novel of author Thomas McGuane.-Plot summary:The Sporting Club chronicles the friendship and rivalry of Vernor Stanton, an unstable patrician iconoclast, and the protagonist, Stanton's lifelong friend, James Quinn...
(published in 1969 with the assistance of Harrison). The Sporting Club is an anarchic portrayal of aristocratic decline and eventual ruin at an elite Michigan outdoor club. McGuane wrote the novel in a frenetic six weeks after his initial hopes for a published novel in The Dial were dashed by its editor at the time, E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is an American author.- Biography :Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent...
.
Upon completing his Stegner Fellowship, McGuane and his wife, Rebecca Portia Crockett, moved to Livingston, Montana
Livingston, Montana
-Geography:Livingston is located at , at an altitude of 4.501 feet .According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which, of it is land and 0.38% is waters.-Climate:-Demographics:...
, and when the screen rights to The Sporting Club were purchased, he invested the funds (wisely) in ranch property in Montana’s Paradise Valley. His second novel, The Bushwhacked Piano, a picaresque comedy chronicling the romantic, sporting, and entrepreneurial hijinks of Nicholas Payne, traipsing from Michigan to Montana to Florida and sprinkled with wry commentary on the current state of America throughout, appeared in 1971 to rave reviews. Jonathan Yardley
Jonathan Yardley
Jonathan Yardley is a book critic at The Washington Post, and at one time of the Washington Star. In 1981 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.-Background and education:...
in the New York Times hailed the 31-year-old McGuane as “a talent of Faulknerian
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
potential,” and Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
described McGuane as “a language star.” The novel won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
McGuane’s third novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), was received as continued confirmation of his potential and is perhaps his best known, or at least his most widely acclaimed in literary circles. Shoving off with the ominous invocation, “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic,” the novel utilizes young Thomas Skelton’s desire to be a Key West
Key West
Key West is an island in the Straits of Florida on the North American continent at the southernmost tip of the Florida Keys. Key West is home to the southernmost point in the Continental United States; the island is about from Cuba....
fishing guide as a foil for numerous expressions of word-drunk cultural, familial, and macho angst, culminating in the death of Skelton at the business end of rival guide Nichol Dance’s pistol.
Ninety-Two in the Shade was nominated for a National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
, and it represents the close of the first chapter in McGuane’s public literary life, a closing that may have also coincided with a transforming crash of his Porsche on an icy Texas highway. The crash left him without serious injury but speechless for several days, and he resolved to shed his monastic obsession with writing novels and to assume a new lease on life, a resolution substantially assisted by Hollywood’s offering of lucrative screenwriting opportunities.
Thus began the interlude in McGuane’s career when he became known as “Captain Berserko” and authored screenplays for “Rancho Deluxe” (1973), shot in Livingston, Montana; “The Missouri Breaks” (1976), starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando; and McGuane’s foray into directing with the film version of “92 in the Shade” (1975).
The excesses of those years are reflected – though hardly in full – by McGuane’s tumultuous affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley
Elizabeth Ashley
Elizabeth Ashley is an American actress who first came to prominence as the ingenue in the Broadway play Take Her, She's Mine, which earned her a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play.-Early life:...
(captured in voyeuristic detail in her memoir, Actress), his divorce from his first wife Becky Crockett, (who went on to marry Peter Fonda) his marriage to actress Margot Kidder
Margot Kidder
Margaret Ruth "Margot" Kidder is a Canadian-born American actress. She is perhaps best known for playing Lois Lane in the four Superman movies opposite Christopher Reeve, a role that brought her to widespread recognition....
, the birth of their daughter, Maggie (herself an author), and by his second divorce, all in the span of less than a year.
Emerging from the flaming wreck of celebrity, only a few years after the flaming wreck of his Porsche, McGuane published his most autobiographical novel, Panama, in 1978. His first and, until Driving On the Rim (2010), only novel written in the first person, it is the story of a flash-in-the-pan rock star named Chet Pomeroy who suffers delusion after delusion and can only imagine salvation in the character of Catherine, a literary embodiment of McGuane’s feelings toward his third wife, Laurie Buffett, sister of Jimmy Buffett
Jimmy Buffett
James William "Jimmy" Buffett is a singer-songwriter, author, entrepreneur, and film producer. He is best known for his music, which often portrays an "island escapism" lifestyle. Together with his Coral Reefer Band, Buffett's musical hits include "Margaritaville" , and "Come Monday"...
, one of McGuane’s Key West comrades. The novel was mercilessly panned by critics as self-absorbed and a testament to wasted literary talent – notwithstanding McGuane’s protests that he considered it his best novel and that he was intentionally creating a lugubrious character who was not entitled, in the common view, to his feelings of loss and depression.
An ongoing struggle has ensued between McGuane and his reviewers concerning their expectations for his fiction, and their sense of how much McGuane-the-celebrity was intruding upon his work. The upheaval of the period concluded with the deaths of McGuane’s father, mother, and sister in the span of 30 months, and by McGuane’s admission that he felt no desire to author a comic novel like any of his first three works.
Life after Panama
After Panama, McGuane’s novels changed considerably. Beginning with Nobody’s Angel in 1981, the setting has consistently been in Montana, usually the fictitious town of “Deadrock” (presumably a play on “Livingston”), and the prose for the most part resists the pyrotechnics of Bushwhacked Piano or Ninety-Two in the Shade. Although the wit and the eye for comedy in human affairs remains, the problem of human – and particularly family – relationships is taken far more seriously than in his early novels. The familiar setting and certain personal parallels make for easy inferences of McGuane himself in his string of male protagonists in these novels, albeit with the obvious exception of the female protagonist, Evelyn, in The Cadence of Grass (2002).McGuane is quick to point out, however, that unlike these protagonists, he has been happily married to Laurie Buffett since the late '70s and, in the estimation of one Montana friend (William Kittredge), has a “genius for living well,” the prescription for which seems to include ample family time, reading, writing, cutting horses, and flyfishing, all transpiring in the breathtaking Boulder River valley near McLeod, Montana
McLeod, Montana
McLeod is an unincorporated community in Sweet Grass County, Montana, United States. McLeod is located on Montana Secondary Highway 298 southwest of Big Timber....
, where McGuane has moved his ranch from Paradise Valley, Montana.
Among the later novels, Nothing But Blue Skies stands out as offering the broadest expression of McGuane’s thoughts on life in America and the American West. A hangover from the counterculture lingers, as does disillusionment over economic ambition. The West, perhaps, provides more opportunities for refuge from it all, though the refuge is diminishing every day. Still there are those who worship the “god of handsome land” (McGuane plainly among them) and try their best to understand the interpersonal shortcomings and cynicism of the locals, having faith that many of them are genuinely decent and commendable.
While the whole of McGuane’s fiction has only sporadic episodes of serenity and hopefulness – with Nothing But Blue Skies being one of the most hopeful novels -- Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas...
has observed that McGuane’s nonfiction writing displays a markedly contrasting inner peace and natural spirituality. McGuane’s paean
Paean
A paean is a song or lyric poem expressing triumph or thanksgiving. In classical antiquity, it is usually performed by a chorus, but some examples seem intended for an individual voice...
s to fly fishing (The Longest Silence), horses (Some Horses) and his life in the outdoors (An Outside Chance) capture his belief in the redeeming potential of nature and sporting ritual, and are widely considered among the finest writing in those genres.
Writing style
McGuane's writing is noted for its mastery of language (particularly the early novels), a comic appreciation for the irrational core of many human endeavors, multiple takes on the countercultureCounterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
of the 1960s and 1970s, and an increasing devotion to family relationships and relationships with the natural world in the changing American West, primarily Montana
Montana
Montana is a state in the Western United States. The western third of Montana contains numerous mountain ranges. Smaller, "island ranges" are found in the central third of the state, for a total of 77 named ranges of the Rocky Mountains. This geographical fact is reflected in the state's name,...
, where he has made his home since 1968, and where his last five novels and many of his essays are set.
Works
Fiction- The Sporting Club (1969, novel)
- The Bushwacked Piano (1971, novel)
- Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973, novel)
- Panama (1978, autobiographical novel)
- Nobody's Angel (1981, novel)
- In the Crazies: Book and Portfolio (1984; ltd. ed. of 185)
- Something to Be Desired (1985, novel)
- To Skin a Cat (1986, short stories)
- Keep the Change (1989, novel)
- Nothing but Blue Skies (1992, novel)
- The Cadence of Grass (2002, novel)
- Gallatin Canyon (2007, short stories)
- Driving on the Rim (2010, novel)
Non-fiction
- An Outside Chance (1981)
- Best American Sports Writing, 1992 (1993)
- Live Water (1996)
- Some Horses (1999)
- The Longest Silence (2000)
- Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American Northwest (1999)
- Horses (2005)