John Norman Maclean
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Norman Maclean is an author and journalist best known for his 1999 book, Fire on the Mountain, about the fatal South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain (in Garfield County, Colorado), in 1994. Maclean, a former Washington correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, has written three books about wildfire. The books are non-fiction, but novelistic in approach. Fire on the Mountain, the first, was the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association's best nonfiction title of 1999. Maclean is the son of Montana writer Norman Maclean, who wrote the well-known novella A River Runs Through It.
The younger Maclean's second book, Fire and Ashes: On the Frontlines of American Wildfire, was published in June 2003 by Henry Holt & Co. and named a "best book" of the year by the Chicago Tribune. The book, a collection of stories and essays, chronicles the 1953 Rattlesnake Fire on the Mendocino National Forest in California, the 1999 Sadler Fire in Nevada, and the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana. The Mann Gulch Fire was the subject of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, a book published posthumously with John's assistance. The two fires written about by father and son, Mann Gulch and South Canyon, have many similarities: both involve the deaths of smokejumpers, the elite of firefighting; they occurred in similar terrain, at similar times of day, with similarly surprising fire behavior. There are echoes of those fires as well in the Thirtymile Fire, the subject of Maclean's third book, The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal, published by Henry Holt in June 2007.
The Thirtymile Fire, which burned in north-central Washington in July, 2001, killed four young firefighters and injured several others. The fire remains controversial to this day: the incident commander -- the fire boss -- was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and seven counts of perjury early in 2007. The charges are unprecedented and have caused much comment and anguish in the fire community. Never before has a wildland fire supervisor been charged with criminal offences for negligence in a case where no malicious intent is alleged. The incident commander, Ellreese Daniels, is scheduled for trial in April, 2008, in federal district court in Spokane, Washington.
[edit] Biography
John Maclean was a writer, editor, and reporter for the Chicago Tribune for 30 years before he resigned in 1995 to begin a second career writing books. Maclean was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1943, the second of two children. He attended the University of Chicago school system through high school and graduated from Shimer College, then in Mt. Carroll, Illinois, a one-time satellite of the U of C. An honor student at Shimer, he received the school’s distinguished alumni award in 1975.
Maclean started his journalistic career in 1964 as a police reporter and rewrite man with the legendary City News Bureau of Chicago. He went to work for the Chicago Tribune the following year. He married Frances Ellen McGeachie in 1968; the couple have two adult children, Daniel and John Fitzroy. In 1970, he was assigned to the Washington Bureau of the Tribune. As diplomatic correspondent there he covered the State Department and was a regular on the "Kissinger Shuttle," covering much of the "shuttle diplomacy" of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Maclean was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University for the academic year 1974-75. He became the Tribune’s Foreign Editor in Chicago in 1988. He resigned from the newspaper in 1995 to write Fire on the Mountain.
Maclean, a frequent speaker at wildland fire academies and conventions, is qualified as a federal firefighter Type 2 and a fire information officer.
