Thomas McGuane

McGuane was born in Wyandotte, Michigan, the son of Irish Catholic parents who moved to the Midwest from Massachusetts. His primary education included boarding school at Cranbrook School, but also included work on a ranch in Wyoming, and fishing and hunting. A difficult relationship with his alcoholic father would later shadow much of his fiction. McGuane prefers to consider his roots matrilineal, on which 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. When he was ten years old, he got into a physical altercation with a friend over differing descriptions of a sunset. He began a serious devotion to writing by the age of 16. ==Career==

After briefly attending the University of Michigan and University of Olivet, McGuane graduated from Michigan State University, where he received a BA in English in 1962 and met the writer Jim Harrison. He and Harrison became lifelong friends, bonding over a love for nature. At the Yale School of Drama, where he obtained an MFA in 1965, he studied playwriting and dramatic literature. A Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University in 1966–67 allowed him to finish his first published novel, The Sporting Club, published in 1969. He reassessed his career and changed his focus to Hollywood's lucrative screenwriting opportunities. He entered a period where he became known as "Captain Berserko" and wrote screenplays for Rancho Deluxe (1975), The early 1970s included an affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley, divorce from first wife Becky (who went on to marry Peter Fonda), marriage to actress Margot Kidder, the birth of their daughter, Maggie, and his second divorce—all in less than a year. In 2018, he appeared in conversation with Richard Powers at the New York Public Library. In 2024 he appeared in a film about his time spent fishing and writing in the Florida Keys with other notable writers such as Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Russell Chatham, and Jimmy Buffett. ==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 in the fictitious town of “Deadrock” (presumably a play on “Livingston”). He moved from Paradise Valley to a different property in the Boulder River valley near McLeod, Montana. Larry McMurtry observed that McGuane's nonfiction writing displays a markedly contrasting inner peace and natural spirituality. McGuane's paeans to fly fishing (The Longest Silence), horses (Some Horses) and the outdoors (An Outside Chance) capture his belief in the redemptive potential of nature and sporting ritual. ==Selected works==

;Fiction • The Sporting Club (1969, novel) • The Bushwacked Piano (1971, novel) • Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973, novel) • The Missouri Breaks (1976, screenplay, paperback original) • 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) • The Best American Short Stories (1986, story contribution, "Sportsmen") • Keep the Change (1989, novel) • Nothing but Blue Skies (1992, novel) • The Cadence of Grass (2002, novel) • The Best American Short Stories (2004, story contribution, "Gallatin Canyon") • The Best American Short Stories (2005, story contribution, "Old Friends") • The Best American Short Stories (2006, story contribution, "Cowboy") • Gallatin Canyon (2006, short stories) • Driving on the Rim (2010, novel) • Crow Fair (2015, short stories) • The Best American Short Stories 2015 (2015, story contribution, "Motherlode") • Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories (2018, short stories) • A Wooded Shore (2025, short stories) ;Non-fiction • An Outside Chance (1981) • Best American Sports Writing, 1992 (1993) • Live Water (1996) • The Best American Essays (1997, essay contribution, "Twenty-fish Days") • The Best American Sports Writing (1997, essay contribution, "The Way Home") • Some Horses (1999) • The Longest Silence (2000) • Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American Northwest (1999) • Horses (2005) • The Best American Sports Writing (2005, essay contribution, "Seeing Snook") • The Best American Mystery Stories (2012, essay contribution, "The Good Samaritan") • The Best American Mystery Stories (2015, essay contribution, "Motherlode") ;Screenplays • Rancho Deluxe (1975) • 92 in the Shade (1975) • The Missouri Breaks (1976) • Tom Horn (1981) • Cold Feet (1989) • Partners (1993) ==References==