Norman was a legendary teacher of undergraduates, but had written almost nothing throughout his career – two obscure articles, and a primer on map reading for American GIs during the Second World War (he was very proud of that). His conversation was lively and unpredictable – a talk about baseball would be prefaced by a discourse on Wordsworth's view of the imagination an account of the Saturday-night fights in the Missoula bars of his youth followed recollections of being taught by Robert Frost. As a teenager I knew him well we'd often go for walks in the Palos Park Preserve on Chicago's western edge. Norman Maclean was a native of Montana who had come to the university in the 1920s, after deciding to become a teacher of English literature instead of a forest ranger. The neighbourhood had more than its share of writers, but I never knew any of them – until, remarkably, a friend of my father's wrote a book that made him world-famous. It's dominated by the University of Chicago (where Obama taught at the law school), and forms an odd oasis, a famously cerebral institution surrounded by impoverished black ghetto on three sides. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in Hyde Park, a neighbourhood now best known as the home of Barack Obama.
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