John Norman Maclean

John Norman Maclean (born 1943), is a prize-winning author and journalist, has published four books on fatal wildland fires.

Maclean was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1943, the second of two children. He attended the 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.

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 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 1974-1975 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.

Maclean is well known for his first book, Fire on the Mountain, about the deadly South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain (in Garfield County, Colorado), in 1994. Maclean is a former editor and Washington correspondent for The Chicago Tribune. His books are non-fiction, but novelistic in approach. Fire on the Mountain was the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association's best nonfiction title of 1999. It was made into a two-hour eponymous documentary by the History Channel that won the Cine Award for Excellence as best documentary of 2004 and was a finalist for an Emmy Award. Maclean is the son of Norman Maclean, author of the novella A River Runs Through It.

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