How is fishing used as a metaphor in Thomas McGuane’s fiction?

McGuane’s economic writing style has been compared to that of Ernest Hemingway. Are the two writers similar in other ways?

What does McGuane’s fiction say about relations between fathers and sons?

What does McGuane’s fiction say about being a man in contemporary America? Is he suggesting that something has been lost from American life?

Describe the vision of the American West in McGuane’s Montana novels.

How is business corruption a consistent theme in McGuane’s fiction?

Compare two McGuane novels as voyages of self-discovery.

In addition to writing novels, Thomas McGuane (muh-GWAYN) produced work for motion pictures and for popular magazines. He wrote the screenplay and directed the film version of Ninety-two in the Shade (1975), wrote the scripts for Rancho DeLuxe (1973) and The Missouri Breaks (1975), and shared credit with Bud Shrake for Tom Horn (1980) and with Jim Harrison for Cold Feet (1989). An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport (1980) contains many of his magazine pieces, and The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing (1999) and Some Horses (1999) are collections of his nonfiction writings. His short fiction is collected in To Skin a Cat (1986) and Gallatin Canyon (2006). The year 2007 saw the publication of Conversations with Thomas McGuane, a book of interviews with the author.

Early in his career, Thomas McGuane was heralded as one of the most promising writers of his generation, one with a good chance to become a major American writer. He appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and was compared favorably with Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow. The Bushwhacked Piano won the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and Ninety-two in the Shade was nominated for a National Book Award. In the mid-1970’s, however, when he began to devote the majority of his energies to writing for films, McGuane was dismissed as a sellout. In the late 1970’s, his film career seemingly over, McGuane returned to publishing novels. Although Hollywood would continue to option screenplays written in the 1970’s, McGuane maintained that novels were his true calling and that his goal was to be “a true man of literature,a professional.” Something to Be Desired and Keep the Change reaffirmed his position as a contender for inclusion in the Americancanon. In 1989, McGuane received the Montana Centennial Award for Literature.