SOURCE: "Interview with Thomas McGuane," in Conversations with American Novelists, edited by Kay Bonetti, et al., University of Missouri Press, 1997, pp. 56-75.

In the following interview conducted in 1984, McGuane discusses how he integrates his lifestyle as a Montana Rancher with his writing career.

Tom McGuane's writing career began in the sixties. This interview catches him at age forty-five, looking back on a rebellious youth and forward toward the issues of middle age. He speaks of his enduring fascination with comic writing. He says that the subject of his early novels was the expression of the American dream in the wild West of the 1960s and 1970s, and the realization that acting on those ideals could not be survived. The author of ten books, McGuane writes about brooding protagonists, displaced people, characters who cannot seem to put down roots or reach out to things beyond themselves. These characters are...