John Norman Maclean - Biography

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 former satellite school of the University of Chicago. 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; they have two adult sons, Daniel, a science teacher in Anchorage, Alaska, and John Fitzroy, a public defender for the state of Maryland. In 1970, Maclean 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 1974-75 academic year. 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, workshops, and conventions, is a member of the Seeley Lake Volunteer Fire Department and the Explorer's Club. He is a qualified as a federal public information officer.