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There are two McGuanes and the break between them is real. The early one wrote fast, funny, chemically overheated novels in Key West and got called Captain Berserko by the people he drank with. The later one lives on a ranch in Montana, competes in cutting-horse events, quit drinking in 1981, and writes some of the most controlled short stories in American fiction. What survives the change is the joke buried in the sentence and the same central character: a man who is perfectly capable and cannot stop wrecking his own life.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 novels · 5 story collections · Short Stories · Updated September 2026
McGuane in conversation: following your dreams in a material world
Quick facts about Thomas McGuane
The Sporting Club
A sadistic prankster wages psychological war on a decaying Michigan hunting club until the whole aristocratic edifice comes down. Written during his Stegner year at Stanford.
The Bushwhacked Piano
Nicholas Payne chases a girl and a bat-tower scheme across the West. Won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy.
The purest example of the early manic style — the sentences are showing off and they have earned it.
Ninety-Two in the Shade
Thomas Skelton comes home to Key West to become a fishing skiff guide and get out of the company of burn-outs. That puts him in the way of Nichol Dance, an established guide with a reputation for homicide, who tells him plainly that if he ever takes out a paying client, Dance will kill him. Skelton takes out a client.
A National Book Award finalist and still the book to hand people first: short, funny, propulsive, and shaped like a tragedy underneath. He adapted and directed the film himself two years later.
Panama
A burnt-out rock star narrates his own disintegration in Key West. His most personal book, and the one that was savaged on publication.
McGuane has said it is his best, and a number of critics agree with him. It is also airless and formally aggressive, so it is a terrible place to begin and a very good place to arrive.
Nobody's Angel
An ex-Army tank officer comes home to a Montana ranch, a mad grandfather and a doomed affair. The first of the Montana books. Frequently dated 1982 from the reviews.
Something to Be Desired
A man abandons wife and job to buy the ranch of the woman who ruined him. Often listed as 1985 — that is the paperback.
Keep the Change
Joe Starling, a failed painter, goes back to Montana to reclaim the family ranch and some idea of his own competence.
Nothing but Blue Skies
Frank Copenhaver, a cattle broker, comes apart spectacularly after his wife leaves him.
The most fully achieved of the marriage-collapse novels, and the one long-time readers most often name as the real best.
The Cadence of Grass
A dead patriarch's poisonous will holds a Montana family hostage.
Driving on the Rim
Dr Berl Pickett, a small-town Montana physician, is accused of killing a former lover. His tenth and, so far, last novel.
To Skin a Cat
His first collection: hard, often brutal stories. Commonly misdated 1987 from the paperback.
Gallatin Canyon
Ten stories, and the book where the late spare manner arrives.
Crow Fair
Seventeen Montana stories. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year.
If you would rather start with the stories than the novels, start here. The comic energy has been compressed into single lines and the endings withhold rather than explode.
Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories
Five hundred and seventy-six pages gathering the three earlier collections plus eight new stories — about forty-five in all. A career retrospective rather than a book of new work, so buy it instead of the individual volumes, not as well as.
A Wooded Shore: And Other Stories
Nine stories, closing with a title novella about generational family decay. Published in October 2025, when he was 85.
The non-fiction, the films, and two things that are not his
McGuane is as well known among anglers as among novelists, and he had a substantial Hollywood career in the 1970s. What matters:
- The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing (1999) — Thirty-three essays, and the book most often named the best modern book about fishing by anyone. Very commonly misdated 2000 or 2001.
- An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport (1980) — His first essay collection — fishing, motorcycles, rodeo, boats. Expanded and reissued in 1990, which is why you will see both years.
- Some Horses (1999) — Essays on horses and horsemanship, out of the cutting-horse life rather than about it from the outside.
- Screenplays — Rancho Deluxe (1975), The Missouri Breaks (1976, Brando and Nicholson), Tom Horn (1980, with Bud Shrake) and Cold Feet (1989, with his friend Jim Harrison). He also wrote and directed 92 in the Shade (1975) from his own novel.
- Not his — The Sporting Club was filmed in 1971 but he did not write the screenplay, and The Refugee (2016) is a single-story ebook reprinting a story from Gallatin Canyon, not a new book. Both turn up on bibliographies as though they were.
Thomas McGuane's Writing Style: The Recklessness Contracts
The early novels are high-velocity comic performances — the standard critical adjectives are amphetamine-paced and acetylene-bright, and they are fair. They digress luxuriantly, they escalate, and they are written by someone enjoying his own sentences. McGuane even coined a word for what he was after in Panama: joco-splenetic, jokes delivered from a position of rage. That is the whole early mode in one hyphenated adjective.
Then it contracts. The Los Angeles Times put it better than anyone reviewing Cloudbursts in 2018: in the later work the recklessness contracts rather than sprays around. The wildness did not leave, it got denser. It moved off the surface of the prose and into the situations, the endings turned enigmatic instead of explosive, and McGuane described his newest work as tending toward a kind of irony-free narrative. His own summary of the method is worth having: freedom to improvise and commitment to revision are the basis of my practice.
The comedy is almost always a property of the sentence rather than the scene — a swerve of diction, a sudden formality, an over-precise noun. The comparison people reach for is Gogol as often as Twain, and Gogol is the right one, because the humour is structural and deadpan and it does not relieve anything. The landscape, meanwhile, is never scenery. His people run businesses, put up fences, farm, ranch, guide and fish; the land is something they are trying to make a living off and usually failing to. The Key West books are hot, hallucinatory and terminal; the Montana books are cold, dry and concerned with inheritance and property. The prose changes climate with them.
And then there is the Hemingway comparison, which is reflexive and lazy. Fishing, boats, Key West, a Michigan boyhood, the West — the surface overlaps almost completely. But Téa Obreht put the difference exactly right: below those similarities McGuane's fiction is lensed with a great deal more vulnerability and heart, sorrow and awe. Hemingway's sentences withhold; McGuane's overflow and then catch themselves. Hemingway's men are tested and either hold or do not. McGuane's men cannot behave — they are competent adults who sabotage their own lives out of restlessness and appetite, and the books grant them no exemption for it. That is the engine of the whole career: unearned feeling, fully felt.
Thomas McGuane Books in Order
The novels run The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), Panama (1978), Nobody's Angel (1981), Something to Be Desired (1984), Keep the Change (1989), Nothing but Blue Skies (1992), The Cadence of Grass (2002) and Driving on the Rim (2010). Nothing is a series and nothing needs to be read in sequence.
Four years get printed wrong constantly. Ninety-Two in the Shade is 1973 — you will see 1974 (the award) and 1975 (the film and paperback), including on his own publisher's site. Panama is 1978, not 1977. Something to Be Desired is 1984, not 1985. To Skin a Cat is 1986, not 1987. And The Longest Silence is 1999, not 2000 or 2001.
One buying note. Cloudbursts (2018) is a collected volume: it contains most of To Skin a Cat, Gallatin Canyon and Crow Fair, plus eight new stories. Buy it instead of those three, not in addition to them.
Where to start with Thomas McGuane
If you have never read him
→ Ninety-Two in the Shade. Short, funny, fast, and it contains both McGuanes — the manic style and a genuine tragic shape underneath it.
If you prefer short stories
→ Crow Fair (2015) for the late manner at its best, or Cloudbursts if you want the whole career in one very large book.
If you want the fishing
→ The Longest Silence. You do not have to fish to read it; it is the easiest place to hear the voice with nothing in the way.
What not to start with
→ Panama. It may well be his best and it is a dreadful introduction — hermetic, formally aggressive, and it broke his critical reputation for a decade.
If this is your shelf
→ My best short story collections list has more writers working at this level in the short form.
Frequently asked questions about Thomas McGuane's books
How many books has Thomas McGuane written?
Ten novels, five short story collections and around half a dozen works of non-fiction, plus screenplays. Note that his publisher's own biography is out of date: it says ten novels, four collections and three works of non-fiction, and predates both Cloudbursts (2018) and A Wooded Shore (2025).
Is Thomas McGuane still writing?
Yes. His most recent book, the story collection A Wooded Shore: And Other Stories, was published by Knopf in October 2025, when he was 85. His last novel was Driving on the Rim in 2010.
What is Ninety-Two in the Shade about?
Thomas Skelton, tired of the junkies and burn-outs around him, goes home to Key West to become a fishing skiff guide. That puts him in direct competition with Nichol Dance, an established guide with infallible instincts and a reputation for homicide, who warns him that if he ever takes out a paying client, Dance will kill him. Skelton takes out a client. It was a National Book Award finalist in 1974, and McGuane adapted and directed the film himself in 1975.
Did Thomas McGuane write films?
Yes. He wrote Rancho Deluxe (1975), The Missouri Breaks (1976, with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson), and co-wrote Tom Horn (1980) and Cold Feet (1989, with Jim Harrison). He also wrote and directed the film of his own novel, 92 in the Shade (1975). His verdict on the trade: aspiring to be a screenwriter is like aspiring to be a co-pilot.
Is Thomas McGuane related to anyone famous?
By marriage. His wife of nearly fifty years, Laurie Buffett McGuane, is the sister of the singer Jimmy Buffett; they were part of the same Key West circle in the 1970s. His second wife was the actress Margot Kidder, whom he directed in 92 in the Shade. He was also a lifelong friend of the novelist and poet Jim Harrison, whom he met at Michigan State and with whom he later co-wrote a screenplay.
“I thought that if you didn’t work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, every day. I thought that was the deal. I still think that’s the deal.”
Thomas McGuane, “The Art of Fiction No. 89”, interviewed by Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery, The Paris Review, Issue 97, Fall 1985. If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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