Norman Maclean wrote vividly about his family in both fictionalized and non-fictional accounts, including the bestseller, A River Runs Through It, which remains an iconic work of 20th century American literature.
He spent the summers riding circuit among small Presbyterian congregations in the pioneer farming communities of the Pembina Valley Region of south-central Manitoba.
Finding the farm land there to be poor, however, John Davidson and his family had moved west by oxcart and settled on a homestead at New Haven, near Manitou, Manitoba.
[7] The eldest son Norman Maclean, was born at Clarinda, Iowa, in 1902 and went on to become a professor at the University of Chicago and a highly regarded figure in 20th century American literature.
On the early morning of May 2, 1938, Paul Maclean was attacked and brutally beaten at Sixty-Third Street and Drexel Avenue in Chicago by two men who, according to one eyewitness, drove away afterwards in a car.
Following a homicide investigation by Detective Sergeant Ignatius Sheehan, the Chicago Police Department ruled Paul Maclean's murder to be a mugging gone bad.
Another theory at the time was that Paul MacLean was murdered over his inability or refusal to pay an illegal gambling or loansharking debt owed to the Chicago Outfit.
[10] With his father's encouragement, Norman wrote a slightly fictionalized account of their childhood and last summer together with their parents in A River Runs Through It which was published in 1976 and later adapted into a film.