Henry David Thoreau, Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck liked to fish, and the pantheon of American literature is populated by a legion of other sports-loving authors who celebrated the pleasures of fly fishing—like writing, a solitary pursuit requiring patience, persistence, and skill. Few scholars of American literature have made the connection between fly fishing and writing in their careers as convincingly as the poet-scholar Robert DeMott, Kennedy Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Ohio University. The author of essential studies of John Steinbeck’s reading and writing, DeMott is also the editor of Working Days, the collection of journals kept by Steinbeck while writing The Grapes of Wrath, and of an anthology, Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing. All this makes the title of his new book—Angling Days: A Fly Fisher’s Journals—doubly poetic, particularly for fans of John Steinbeck. “No matter how deeply and obsessively I go into fly fishing for trout, a passion of mine for 60 years,” DeMott says, “I try never to lose sight of John Steinbeck’s comment in a lovely little essay of his called ‘On Fishing,’ that ‘any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming.’” Angling Days will be released by Skyhorse Publishing on June 28. Whether or not you love fly fishing like DeMott, it belongs on your John Steinbeck shelf.
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I hope Robert sells a million copies, and I’m certainly going to purchase one. But the Steinbeck Now administration team should never mention fly fishing literature without mentioing in bold letters Norman Maclean’s gorgeous “A River Runs Through It.”
To quote: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it . . . ”
“On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops . . . ”
“I am haunted by waters.”
I was a senior at Ohio University in 1981–majoring in psychology. I enrolled in DeMott’s Interpretation of Fiction course and it forever influenced my love for all the works of Steinbeck.