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).

[1] 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.

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.

[6] 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.

The novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky[12] and the story "Black Ghost" in Young Men and Fire (1992) are semi-fictionalized accounts of these experiences.

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.

[14] 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.

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.

[22] 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.

Paul later worked alongside Maclean and his wife at the University of Chicago during the Jazz Age and the Depression era.

Paul had talents in writing and fly fishing but became an alcoholic, addicted gambler, notorious brawler and a womanizer.

[24] According to Maclean and statements made to the press by Detective Sergeant Ignatius Sheehan, evidence indicated Paul fought back savagely against his assailants and sold his life very dearly, so much so that the medical examiner found nearly all the bones in his right hand to have been broken during his last fight.

After the funeral, Maclean spent several weeks of compassionate leave with his parents at their family's cabin at Seeley Lake.

[27] Maclean later wrote that his father aged rapidly following Paul's murder and that, "Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting.

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.

"[31] 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.

[32] During World War II, Maclean declined a commission in the Office of Naval Intelligence to serve as dean of students.

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

'"[34] 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.

"[35] Maclean received the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1941 and 1973.

Norman's vision of him, though, brought the consolation of shared experience, taken to an eloquent level, to a host of brothers and sisters who have reached out to wayward siblings only to see them twist and dodge away as Paul did.

The third story describes Maclean's employment as a teenager by the United States Forest Service and is titled "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky.

In a May 26, 1976, letter to Nick Lyons, Maclean explained that "Retrievers Good and Bad" had been the first story he attempted after retirement, that it was about his brother, and that he considered it "both a moral and artistic failure.

"[49] By the time Maclean's A River Runs through It and Other Stories was published, he had begun researching a book about the 13 smokejumpers who lost their lives fighting the 1949 Mann Gulch Forest Fire.

[51] He also struggled to finish Young Men and Fire as his health declined,[52] and because "at the end he lived more for telling and retelling the story — for getting it right — than for publishing it.

It "marked 'the beginning of the end for him,'" and resulted in cognitive decline that forced him to stop work on the unfinished Mann Gulch manuscript.

In 1991, a renovated church retirement home was turned into an undergraduate dormitory on the University of Chicago campus named Maclean House.

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