John N. Maclean

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

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. The book won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers award for the best non-fiction of 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 his father, Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, a book published posthumously with John’s assistance.

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 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.

Maclean's fifth book, "River of Fire: The Rattlesnake Fire and the Mission Boys," (2018) brings up to date his account of the 1953 fire that killed 15 firefighters in northern California, 14 of them members of a missionary fire crew, that he first chronicled in "Fire and Ashes." Following publication of that first account, the site of the fire was reclaimed and turned into a living memorial, with key points located as guides for learning. Many families and friends rediscovered those who were lost . The arsonist who started the fire and was imprisoned for it, Stan Pattan, whom Maclean located, interviewed, and corresponded with for many years, died without an obituary, until this volume was published.

• John Maclean's website