The Bitter Roots

Out of print since its publication in 1941, Macleod’s autobiographical novel offers a more visceral recollection of Missoula, MT, circa 1917–20, than that found in Norman Maclean’s 1976 bestseller A River Runs Through It. Rather than a fly-fishing idyll, readers first encounter that river as the watery grave of a 12-year-old boy who never resurfaces after being tossed in by neighborhood toughs, including Augie Storm, a character loosely based on Norman Maclean’s younger brother Paul. Clashes between the patriotic fervor of World War I and the revolutionary zeal of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), documented in news snippets that punctuate each episodic chapter in the style of Dos Passos, are mirrored in young Pauly Craig’s ardent struggles to measure up as a man in a place of often brutish masculinity, while drawn toward poetry by the rugged majesty of the Bitterroot wilderness. A welcome afterword by Missoula author Gabriella Graceffo outlines the later life of the unjustly forgotten Macleod, whose success as a proletarian poet took him from New York to Russia before returning home to grapple with his tangled Western roots.