A protege of “A River Runs Through It” author Norman Maclean has written a biography that contrasts an academic career with a retirement spent writing.

Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories” is a literary masterpiece that, although published in 1976, captivates readers to this day.

The title story, a semiautobiographical novella, conveys a family tragedy and a Western ethos that Maclean explored and distilled in a manner both elegant and lean.

Now, a new book by someone who knew Maclean well provides an insightful review of Maclean’s life, and life’s work.

In “Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers,” Rebecca McCarthy offers thoughtful distinctions between Maclean’s profession — teaching, and his calling — writing.

McCarthy was a teenager when she first met Maclean in Montana. Raised in the South, she had been sent to spend the summer with her brother, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and his young family at Seeley Lake.

This week’s book

“Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers” by Rebecca McCarthy

University of Washington Press — 272 pp — $29.95

Maclean, finishing up a long career as a professor at the University of Chicago, was considered a “summer person” on the lake — although he’d spent much of his youth in Montana, and the cabin he returned to every year was the one that his parents had inhabited before him.

When Maclean and McCarthy first met, he had yet to see the publication of his first book, although he had invested much of his life in parsing literature and letters.

Recognizing McCarthy’s writing ambitions, the professor adopted her as “a project,” providing mentorship and friendship as she graduated from high school, moved on to college (she attended the University of Chicago at Maclean’s urging), and learned how to sharpen her writing and critical thinking skills.

On campus, Maclean was revered as an attentive professor to his students, and McCarthy shares how he offered both generous advice and sometimes barbed criticism of her work, delivered in rambles through Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood or over crockpot suppers of stew.

During summers back at Seeley Lake, McCarthy also got flyfishing pointers from Maclean.

Throughout the sustained friendship that existed between Maclean and McCarthy’s family (her brother took the photo that graces the cover of the paperback editions of “A River Runs Through It”), McCarthy came to perceive Maclean’s struggle in integrating his urban, academic life with his roots in Montana’s river-laced mountains.

She notes that it was only after Maclean retired that he was able to devote fruitful attention to honing his craft. He did this with as strict an adherence to excellence as he had demanded of his students. Progress was slow. Drafts were many.

Readers will learn that Maclean finally gave up on a yearslong project to write about Custer’s Last Stand. And by the time of his death, he still hadn’t figured out how to pull together all of his writings on a firefighting catastrophe in Montana’s mountains. That manuscript was edited posthumously and published as “Young Men and Fire” in 1992.

But Maclean did have the satisfaction of seeing “A River Runs Through It” published and met with acclaim — an achievement, McCarthy suggests, that gave Maclean the life/work reconciliation he had sought for so long.