When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again. So what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvellous promise of less than a three-day resurrection.

Selections from his work plus previously unpubliNorman Macleand material including letters and his writings on George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Norman Fitzroy Maclean (December 23 1902 – August 2 1990) was an American author and scholar noted for his books A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976) and Young Men and Fire (1992). Too young to enlist in the military during World War I Maclean worked in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service in what is now the Bitterroot National Forest of northwestern Montana.