ABSTRACT
Thomas McGuane's life has a quality of myth to it; like Hemingway, whom he resembles in several ways, he seems at times to live more excitingly than he writes or at least to live excitingly in order to accumulate a rich store of experience about which to write. He comes from an upper-middle-class, Irish-American family in Michigan. After a private secondary education in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, he attended the University of Michigan, where he flunked out. He graduated from Michigan State University, where he was the editor of the literary magazine and worked on his own writing. In an interview he has said that at this point of his life, he was a 'sociopath'. He has also attended not only Yale, from which he received an MFA in 1965, but Stanford University. McGuane's funniest novel is also probably his best, his second book, The Bushwhacked Piano.
