"The finest story of the outdoors in American literature." - Sports Illustrated
"'Big Two-Hearted River' may be the finest piece of fiction ever written about the experience of the veteran." - The Guardian
"Matchlessly eloquent in its evocation of the pleasures of the senses and of the feeling of place. ... In 'Big Two-Hearted River,' there are moments that are not just constructed like a Cézanne painting; they look like a Cézanne painting." - Adam Gopnick, The New Yorker
"Some of the best English prose of the twentieth century." - Larry McMurtry, The New York Review of Books
"In Hemingway, fishing was always and infinitely metaphorical; Nick Adams plumbs the depths of his soul as he dangles a line." - Jay Parini, New York Times Book Review
"A masterpiece, one of those rare instances when a superb writer reaches a level reserved only for those extraordinary talents with a nose for what is fundamental but not entirely clear and rational in human existence." - Claremont Review of Books
"Ernest Hemingway's 'Big Two-Hearted River' retains its hold on me, some 40 years after my first reading. It is a story that can be recited and revealed-like currents in a beloved stream-as fresh as each spring day." - James F. Vesely, Seattle Times
Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His novels include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, he died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.
John N. Maclean is the author of Home Waters, a memoir of his family's four-generation connection to Montana's Blackfoot River, which his father, Norman Maclean, made famous in A River Runs through It. He spent thirty years at the Chicago Tribune, then wrote five nonfiction books about wildland fire that are considered a staple of fire literature. Maclean, an avid fly fisherman, lives in Washington, DC, and at a family cabin in Montana.