SOURCE: "Tom McGuane," in Publishers Weekly, September 29, 1989, p. 50, 52.

In the following essay, McGuane talks about his writing career, his novel Keep the Change, and life on his Montana ranch.

"The heir to Hemingway"; "Captain Berserko"; "macho pig"—Thomas McGuane has had plenty of labels to live down and just as many to live up to in his nine-book career, and none of them seems to do him justice.

Barely 30 when he burst onto the literary scene with The Sporting Club, he saw his star as a novelist soar with The Bushwacked Piano and 92 in the Shade. Lyrical, coruscating and subtly political, his books made him a media darling—the counterculture cowboy. By 1975 he was writing and directing the film of his third novel, and careening toward celebrity and its gossip-page trappings: affairs, divorce, remarriage (to Margot Kidder), another divorce, remarriage, prodigious drinking and a reputation for excess in...