Awards

• Winner of National Book Critics Circle Award (General Nonfiction) 1992

Overview

On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy. Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. ""A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic.""--from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992 ""A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part elegy and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the rest it brings.""--Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune ""An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character.... Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory.""--Timothy Foote, USA Today ""Beautiful.... A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud.""--Robert M. Adams, The New York Review of Books ""Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. Just as the reader of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. Don't hesitate to take the plunge.""--Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World ""Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. It is the pinnacle of smokejumping literature and a classic work of 20th-century nonfiction.""--John Holkeboer, The Wall Street Journal ""Maclean is always with the brave young dead. . . . They could not have found a storyteller with a better claim to represent their honor. . . . A great book.""--James R. Kincaid, New York Times Book Review

Full Product Details

9780226500621

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Reviews

This 1992 masterpiece of literary nonfiction is a taut, terrifying yet poetic account of how, in 1949, thirteen young firefighters lost their lives while fighting a conflagration in a remote, steeply sloped part of western Montana. Maclean . . . is unsparing in his prose and dogged in his reporting, piecing together the elements that led to more than a dozen men suffocating and burning to death. The story, which I ve read at least four times now, is agonizing to read, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. It is also one of the most pleasurable experiences I ve had. --Anna Holmes New York Times Book Review, Bookends

This 1992 masterpiece of literary nonfiction is a taut, terrifying yet poetic account of how, in 1949, thirteen young firefighters lost their lives while fighting a conflagration in a remote, steeply sloped part of western Montana. Maclean . . . is unsparing in his prose and dogged in his reporting, piecing together the elements that led to more than a dozen men suffocating and burning to death. The story, which I've read at least four times now, is agonizing to read, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. It is also one of the most pleasurable experiences I've had. --Anna Holmes New York Times Book Review, Bookends

This 1992 masterpiece of literary nonfiction is a taut, terrifying yet poetic account of how, in 1949, thirteen young firefighters lost their lives while fighting a conflagration in a remote, steeply sloped part of western Montana. Maclean . . . is unsparing in his prose and dogged in his reporting, piecing together the elements that led to more than a dozen men suffocating and burning to death. The story, which I've read at least four times now, is agonizing to read, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. It is also one of the most pleasurable experiences I've had. --Anna Holmes New York Times Book Review, Bookends This 1992 masterpiece of literary nonfiction is a taut, terrifying yet poetic account of how, in 1949, thirteen young firefighters lost their lives while fighting a conflagration in a remote, steeply sloped part of western Montana. Maclean . . . is unsparing in his prose and dogged in his reporting, piecing together the elements that led to more than a dozen men suffocating and burning to death. The story, which I ve read at least four times now, is agonizing to read, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. It is also one of the most pleasurable experiences I ve had. --Anna Holmes New York Times Book Review, Bookends -This 1992 masterpiece of literary nonfiction is a taut, terrifying yet poetic account of how, in 1949, thirteen young firefighters lost their lives while fighting a conflagration in a remote, steeply sloped part of western Montana. Maclean . . . is unsparing in his prose and dogged in his reporting, piecing together the elements that led to more than a dozen men suffocating and burning to death. The story, which I've read at least four times now, is agonizing to read, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. It is also one of the most pleasurable experiences I've had.---Anna Holmes -New York Times Book Review, -Bookends- -

The terrifying story of the worst disaster in the history of the US Forest Service's elite Smokejumpers outfit, by the author of the classic A River Runs Through It (1976). Maclean, who died in 1990 at age 88, began his research for this book - unfinished at his death - in 1976. He brought to it his early experience as a logger and firefighter, and his exceptional literary skills. The first half, which crackles with tension, recounts that awful day, August 3, 1959, when 15 Smokejumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch in Montana to combat a small forest fire. Within two hours, 12 men had died (to this day, the only fire fatalities in the history of the Forest Service), suffocated or incinerated when the conflagration underwent a blowout into a flaming wall of death. In the second half, Maclean becomes the protagonist, as he and two survivors return to the gulch in an attempt to piece together exactly what happened, and to determine whether a secondary escape fire lit by the crew foreman to save his men had instead snuffed them out. Here, skeletal, mystical prose holds its own: As you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes.... The history of parachuting, facts about fires - lightning fires, crown fires, blowups - even the death of Maclean's wife add overtones and undertones to the tale. But the basic song remains a dirge, and also a paean to manhood, bravery, and the mysteries of the spirit. Maclean calls his book among other things...an exercise for old age. It is also an exercise in age-old wisdom - the lesson that suffering is the surest path to truth - exhaustively researched and lovingly expressed. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Norman Maclean (1902-1990), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Western Rocky Mountains of Montana and worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forestry Service before beginning his academic career. He was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago until 1973.

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