John Norman Maclean

John Norman Maclean

John N. Maclean is an author and journalist best known for his 1999 book, Fire on the Mountain, about the deadly 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. It was made into a two-hour eponymous documentary by the History Channel that won the Cine Award for Excellence as best documentary of 2004 and was a finalist for an Emmy Award. Maclean is the son of Montana writer Norman Maclean, who wrote the well-known novella A River Runs Through It.

John N. 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 northern 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, at Montana's Mann Gulch and Colorado's Storm King Mountain, have many similarities: both involved the deaths of smokejumpers, and both fires burned in steep canyons with similar fuels and vegetation, and both fires exhibited extreme fire behavior that should have been foreseen - with fatal results. 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. Maclean has written a fourth book, about Southern California's Esperanza Fire of 2006 that killed a five-man Forest Service engine crew, and the subsequent trial and conviction of Raymond Oyler, the arsonist convicted of setting the fire. Oyler was sentenced to death after being found guilty on five counts of first-degree murder and numerous other charges related to a series of arson fires. The book, "The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder and the Agony of Engine 57," is scheduled to be issued in February 2013 by Counterpoint Press of Berkeley, California.