Thomas McGuane

Thomas Francis McGuane III (born December 11, 1939) is an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters,[1] National Cutting Horse Association Members Hall of Fame[2] and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame.[3]

Thomas McGuane
McGuane in 2018
BornThomas Francis McGuane III
(1939-12-11) December 11, 1939
Wyandotte, Michigan
OccupationWriter, novelist, film director, screenwriter
GenreFiction, nonfiction, screenwriting
Spouse
Portia Rebecca Crockett
​
(
m. 1962; div. 1975)

​
(
m. 1975; div. 1977)

Laura Buffett
(
m. 1977)
Children3

McGuane's early novels were noted for a comic appreciation for the irrational core of many human endeavors, multiple takes on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. His later writing reflected 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. He has three children, Annie, Maggie and Thomas.

Early life

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, 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.[4]

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.[4]

Writing career

After briefly attending the University of Michigan and Olivet College, McGuane graduated from Michigan State University, where he received a B.A. in English in 1962 and met his lifelong friend Jim Harrison. At the Yale School of Drama, where he obtained a M.F.A. in 1965, he studied playwriting and dramatic literature. A Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford University in 1966-67 allowed him to finish his first published novel, The Sporting Club, published in 1969.[4]

Upon completing his Stegner Fellowship, McGuane and his first wife, Rebecca Portia Crockett (a direct descendant of Davy Crockett), began to divide their time between Livingston, Montana, and Key West, Florida. When the screen rights to The Sporting Club were purchased, he bought ranch property in Montana's Paradise Valley. His second novel, The Bushwhacked Piano, appeared in 1971. Jonathan Yardley in the New York Times called the 31-year-old McGuane “a talent of Faulknerian potential,” while Saul Bellow described McGuane as “a language star.” The novel won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.[4]

McGuane's third novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), is perhaps his best known. It was nominated for a National Book Award

In 1973, he also crashed his Porsche on an icy Texas highway. The crash left him without serious injuries, but he was speechless for several days, and apparently underwent a reassessment of his career, as he changed his career focus to Hollywood's lucrative screenwriting opportunities.

McGuane entered a stage in his career when he became known as “Captain Berserko” and wrote screenplays for Rancho Deluxe (1973),[5] shot in Livingston; The Missouri Breaks (1976), directed by Arthur Penn and starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando; and self-directing a film adaptation of 92 in the Shade (1975), starring Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Margot Kidder and Harry Dean Stanton.[5]

The early 1970s included an affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley, his divorce from his first wife Becky, (who went on to marry Peter Fonda), remarriage to Margot Kidder, the birth of their daughter, Maggie, and his second divorce, all in less than a year.

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. The character Catherine was said to be a literary embodiment of McGuane's third wife, Laurie Buffett, sister of Jimmy Buffett, one of McGuane's Key West comrades. With the exception of positive reviews in The New Yorker and The Village Voice, 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.

An ongoing struggle has ensued between McGuane and his reviewers concerning their expectations for his fiction, and their sense of how much McGuane's 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.

McGuane won the 2016 Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times,[6] was a finalist[7] for the National Magazine Award in 2013 for his story "River Camp," and was a finalist for the Frank O'Connor Award in 2015.[8]

In 2018, he appeared in conversation with Richard Powers at the New York Public Library.[9]

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”). The familiar setting and certain personal parallels make for easy inferences of McGuane himself in his string of male protagonists in these novels, except for the female protagonist, in The Cadence of Grass (2002).

He moved from the Paradise Valley to a different property in the Boulder River valley near McLeod, Montana.

Larry McMurtry has 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
gollark: "It's basically the same as gaming GPUs, but we toggle on some features, so £2000 please"
gollark: It's annoying how massively overpriced half that stuff is.
gollark: Not enterprisey ones, though.
gollark: Just browsing amazon, you can get new SSDs of that capacity for basically the same price, it seems. In the UK, anyway.
gollark: I do not trust this "cloud".

References
Notes
  1. "Academy Members – American Academy of Arts and Letters". Retrieved 2019-10-08.
  2. "Member Hall of Fame". www.nchacutting.com. Retrieved 2019-10-08.
  3. "Tom McGuane —". cffcm.com. Retrieved 2019-10-08.
  4. "He's Left No Stone Unturned". Time. June 24, 2001. Retrieved 20 March 2012.
  5. Eder, Richard (January 22, 1976). "92 in the Shade (1975) Self-Indulgence Is Triumphant in '92 in the Shade'". The New York Times.
  6. "The Los Angeles Times to Honor Novelist Thomas McGuane at Annual Ceremony Recognizing Outstanding Literary Achievement". Los Angeles Times. 2017-02-22. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
  8. Doyle, Martin. "Shortlist revealed for €25,000 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2020-02-27.
Bibliography
  • American Audio Prose Library. "Interview with Tom McGaune". 1985
  • "The Art of Fiction" (Thomas McGuane interview) Paris Review (Fall 1985)
  • Garcia, Guy D. "He's Left No Stone Unturned". Time (December 25, 1989)
  • McMurtry, Larry. "On the Big Two-Hearted River". New York Review of Books (June 27, 2002)
  • Torrey, Beef (ed.) "Conversations with Thomas McGuane"
  • Yardley, Jonathan. Review of The Bushwhacked Piano. New York Times (March 14, 1971)
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