Thomas Francis McGuane III was born in Wyandotte, Michigan, on 11 December 1939. He calls his family, with its own traditions of humor and storytelling, "heavy duty Irish." He grew up mostly in Michigan, where his father manufactured auto parts, but McGuane says of himself, "As sad as it may sound, I'm pretty rootless." His father's stratum of society is often satirized in McGuane's fiction. Part of the years 1955 to 1960 was spent in Florida, where McGuane became interested in sportfishing in the Keys, an interest reflected in articles he has written for Sports Illustrated. He first visited the northern Rockies in 1956 and kept returning. For some years (1968 to about 1974), he alternated between Key West and Livingston, Montana, where he now lives year-round on a 700-acre ranch. Both settings figure prominently in his fiction.

McGuane was educated at Cranbrook, Michigan State University (B.A., 1962), Yale Drama School (M.F.A., 1965), and...