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For Thomas Francis McGuane III that struggle began at the age of ten when a disagreement with a boyhood chum over the description of a sunset ended in a fistfight. "It was my first literary skirmish," he says. Born and raised in Michigan, McGuane was introduced to the outdoors and a stern Irish work ethic by his father, an auto-parts manufacturer. McGuane early on developed an "adventurous image" of what a writer should be from Horatio Hornblower novels and books about World War II. "I saw myself on the deck of an Amazon steamer or something," he recalls. At Michigan State, McGuane edited a literary journal and shunned the budding hippie drug culture with such conviction that his peers dubbed him the "White Knight."
After stints at Yale drama school and Stanford, McGuane realized he had reached a "point of no return" in his literary vocation. "I was in my late 20s," he says. "I had prepared myself for no other career. What was I to do? Start selling lighting fixtures and hope to rise in the corporation?" Instead, he wrote The Sporting Club, an apocalyptic satire of an exclusive Michigan hunt club, which was published in 1969 to rave reviews. Two years later came The Bushwacked Piano, a biting social broadside about a scheme to sell towers stocked with insect-eating bats to the gullible public. In 1973 McGuane upped the ante with Ninety-Two in the Shade, a dazzling novel of free- floating angst and male brinkmanship set in the Florida Keys. Ninety-Two was nominated for a National Book Award, and McGuane became, in the words of ^ Saul Bellow, "a kind of language star." Critics compared the 34-year-old author to Faulkner, Hemingway, Chekov and Camus. The big time -- and Tinseltown -- beckoned. McGuane became a celluloid hotshot, penning scripts for Rancho Deluxe and Tom Horn among other movies. In exchange for writing 1976's The Missouri Breaks, which starred Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, he was given the chance to direct the screen version of Ninety-Two.
Meanwhile, McGuane had used the proceeds from selling the film rights to The Sporting Club to buy a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana, where he moved with his wife, nee Betty Crockett (a direct descendant of Davy), and his son Thomas IV. The breathtaking scenery and anything-goes ambiance soon attracted a freewheeling constellation of characters that included fellow writer Richard Brautigan, actor Peter Fonda, painter Russell Chatham and director Sam Peckinpah. Before long, stories started coming out of the valley, ribald tales of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that have become part of the local lore.