him technically, two whole weeks for the first scene from Hamlet. I'd spend the first day on just the line, 'Who's there?'" U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens took a poetry class taught by Maclean at the University of Chicago and later called him, "the teacher to whom I am most indebted." Maclean also wrote two scholarly articles, "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century" and "Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear", the latter describing a theory of tragedy that he revisited in his later work. Retirement After his retirement in 1973, Maclean began, as his children Jean and John had often encouraged him, to write down the stories he liked to tell. As their father had urged before his death in 1941, Maclean wrote a slightly fictionalized account of his relationship with his brother Paul, beginning with their childhood in Missoula and particularly focusing on their last summer together with their parents before Paul's murder in 1937. The story was included with two other novellas in the collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Another story in the collection described Maclean's employment as a teenager by the United States Forest Service and was titled USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky. The third novella in the collection was Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim". In a 1986 interview, Maclean expressed an intense hatred for mainstream New York City publishing companies, whom he accused of systematically cheating writers from Middle America. MacLean further recalled how his completed manuscript for A River Runs Through It was originally submitted to and rejected by Alfred A. Knopf. In 1976, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories became the first work of fiction ever published by the University of Chicago Press. It was nominated by a selection committee to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977, but the full committee ignored the nomination and did not award a Pulitzer in that category for the year. MacLean later recalled, "I had the good fortune of having a dream come true. I'm sure every rejected writer must dream of a time when he's written something that was rejected which turns out to be quite successful, so that all the publishers who rejected him are now coming around and kissing his ass at high noon, and he can