The author on Trout Dreams:

     I don’t remember my first trout, although I do know that it was a cutthroat and that I caught it in the summer of 1970 on Sunlight Creek, in the Absaroka Mountains east of Yellowstone National Park. I might have been — OK, I almost certainly was — fishing with a worm, and I am fairly certain that my tackle was a spinning outfit borrowed from my father-in-law, Ned Russell. Ned had brought his entire family to the 7D Ranch near Cody, Wyoming, and our two weeks there were my introduction to trout fishing and the Rocky Mountain West. At some point during our stay Ned also let me borrow his fly rod, and despite my ungainly casting I was able to catch a few more cutts — on worms and grasshoppers but also on a fly called a Muddler Minnow. Not one of these sleek little torpedoes, with green-spotted backs and a slash of orange under their jaws, was bigger than ten or twelve inches. Their wild beauty left a deep impression.
     Raised in the suburbs of New York City, I had no fishing experience to speak of before that summer. I had always associated freshwater fish with lakes, and it took me a while to adjust to the realization that they could live in swift mountain streams. An even stranger notion was that insects — mayflies, caddis flies, and stone flies — lived in the same streams and that trout fed on them.
     My literal immersion in this mysterious world was the start of a lifetime’s preoccupation. My chosen career of journalism soon added a dimension to my fly-fishing, and as an occasional outdoor writer I was able to profile some of the sport’s more influential or engaging characters. They include Dan Bailey, who migrated from New York City to Livingston, Montana, in the 1930s and pioneered the fly-fishing mail-order catalog business; Al Troth, the creator of the Elk Hair Caddis; Ed Van Put, a Catskill dry-fly angler of legendary skill; Dennis Black, the hippie-turned-entrepreneur founder of Umpqua Feather Merchants and master steelhead fisherman; and Norman Maclean, author of the great novella A River Runs Through It.
     I learned something from all my subjects. Occasionally the lessons were technical but more often they were philosophical. I think particularly of Dan Bailey and Charley Waterman, two of the least affected people I’ve ever met. Their low-key approach to angling suggests that fishing “success” bears little relation to the number and size of fish caught but has everything to do with attitude.  
— Adapted from the introduction