Young Men and Fire (Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition) in Bloomington, MN

A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction,
Young Men and Fire
describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US 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 the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in
, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical
A River Runs through It and Other Stories
,
is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would write
—
includes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of
The Big Burn
and
The Worst Hard Time
. As moving and profound as when it was first published,
honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul.