Young Men and Fire
Young Men and Fire is a 1992 non-fiction book written by Norman Maclean. It is Maclean's story of his quest to understand the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 and how it led to the deaths of 13 wildland firefighters, 12 of them members of the USFS Smokejumpers. The fire occurred in Mann Gulch in Montana's Gates of the Mountains Wilderness on August 5. The book was a national bestseller and won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction.
Author
English
1992
United States
316
Themes and genre[edit]
Maclean started writing Young Men and Fire in his seventy-fourth year[3] and alludes frequently in the book to his age, both as a motivation and as a difficulty. The Publisher's Note prefacing the book states that "Young Men and Fire was where, near the end, all the lives he had lived would merge: the lives of a woodsman, firefighter, scholar, teacher, and storyteller."[3] On the book's penultimate page, Maclean writes, "I, an old man, have written this fire report. Among other things, it was important to me, as an exercise of old age, to enlarge my knowledge and spirit so I could accompany young men whose lives I might have lived on their way to death."[4]
The book tells the story of an initially routine-seeming fire in which a combination of individually unlikely developments create an inferno in which most of the smoke jumpers are killed.[5] In doing so, it presents themes of fate, misjudgment, and fickle circumstances.[5]
In his introduction to The Norman Maclean Reader, O. Alan Weltzien says that Young Men and Fire's achievement "rests in the insistent way Maclean approaches, closely and personally, the unknowable: the final minutes and seconds when the Smokejumpers are running for their lives as the towering, suffering inferno overtakes them. More generally, it rests in the way Maclean concedes and makes a theme of his uncertainty and doubt in the face of unrecoverable history."[6]
A recurring theme in the book is Maclean's wish to give a shape to the Mann Gulch disaster. In his foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Young Men and Fire, author Timothy Egan describes Maclean as "trying to shape, or at least to see, art in tragedy while acknowledging that 'tragedy is the most demanding of all literary forms.'"[7] Reviewer John Ottenhoff notes in The Christian Century that "As in King Lear, about which Maclean had written eloquently in his career at the University of Chicago, death informs life, and compassion redeems pointless deaths."[8] Literary scholar Lindsay Atnip argues that for Maclean to create tragedy out of catastrophe "amounts not just to explaining why things went terribly wrong, but also seeing in the catastrophe an intimation of certain hidden or unacknowledged conditions of human life".[9]
Young Men and Fire has been called a nonfiction novel.[10] Reviewing the Young Men and Fire in the Times Literary Supplement, Roger Just called it "extremely difficult to classify: 'a true story of the Mann Gulch Fire' as the cover proclaims; but also a detective story; also a semi-scientific treatise on forest fires; also an autobiography of a man's closing years; also the summation of a career in which life and literature meld."[11] In the Washington Post Book World, reviewer Dennis Drabelle called Young Men and Fire "worthy of comparison to the masterpiece in its genre, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood".[12] In USA Today, reviewer Timothy Foote compared the book to James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.