I don't remember what I had in mind with Trout Bum-if anything-but I ended up chronicling fly fishing not as recreation but as a subculture, a lifestyle, or what Thomas McGuane once described as "A way of looking at the world." Even as late as the 1980s, the archetypical fly fisherman in print was rustic, but vaguely uppercrust in a tweedy, British sort of way, while in the west I kept running into fly fishers who looked and sometimes acted like they'd been raised by wolves. I don't know if I was especially interested in this low-rent end of it, but that's where I found myself: hence the title. Few books have had the impact that this cult classic has had on the fly-fishing world. The wit, warmth, and the easy familiarity that John Gierach shares in Trout Bum is really about why people fish as much as it is about how they fish, and it is ultimately about enduring values and about living in harmony with our environment. There's no telling how many anglers have quit their jobs and headed west after reading this classic collection of fly-fishing essays. Book jacket.