John N. Maclean

John Norman Maclean (born 1943), is an author and journalist who has published four books on fatal wildland fires. He is the son of Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It.

Biography

John N. 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 in Mt. Carroll, Illinois, then a satellite school of the U of C.

Maclean began his career in journalism in 1964 as a police reporter and rewrite man with the 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 1974-1975 academic year and became the Tribune’s Foreign Editor in Chicago in 1988. He resigned from the newspaper in 1995 (after news reports of Colorado's tragic South Canyon Fire) to write Fire on the Mountain and has since published three other books on fatal wildland fires.

In the late 1980's he was a daily guest on WBEZ radio's "Midday with Sondra Gair" news program, billed as Energy and Economics Reporter.^[1]

Publications

Maclean's first book was Fire on the Mountain, about the deadly South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain (in Garfield County, Colorado), in 1994.

Maclean's second book, Fire and Ashes: On the Frontlines of American Wildfire, was published in 2003 and 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, which was the subject of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, a book published posthumously with the assistance of Norman's son John.

Maclean's third book, The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal, recounts the deadly Thirtymile Fire (and the controversy and recriminations that raged in its aftermath). The Thirtymile entrapped and killed four members of a fire crew.

Maclean's fourth book, "The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder and the Agony of Engine 57" details the 2006 southern California wildfire that killed a five-man Forest Service engine crew. The arsonist, Raymond Lee Oyler, was the first person ever convicted of murder for setting a wildland fire; Oyler was sentenced to death^[2] and remains on Death Row at California's San Quentin State Prison.

References

External links

• John Maclean's website