Young Men and Fire - Norman Maclean

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Résumé :
Twenty-five years after its first publication, Young Men and Fire is read avidly by students of literary nonfiction for its blend of hard-earned research, memoir, and an old man's wisdom. It tells one of the most infamous stories in the history of wildland firefighting: 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. On the ground, they were joined by a local fireguard. Two hours after the jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. For forty years, Maclean was haunted by these deaths. And for the last years of his life, he struggled to write a book that would put back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch disaster and to give it the dignity of tragedy. The result is both the definitive account of what happened to the Smokejumpers on that remote Montana mountainside in 1949, and the narrative of a writer's quest for meaning in the face of elusive facts and the waning energies of old age....

Biographie:
Norman Maclean (1902-1990), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana. As a young man, he worked in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. He was awarded an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago, teaching the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. After his retirement in 1973, he began to write the stories he liked to tell, which became the book A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, published to widespread acclaim. The book was the first work of original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press. It was nominated by a selection committee to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977, but the full committee ignored the nomination and did not award a Pulitzer in that category for the year. In the last years of his life, he wrote an account of the 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire. It was published posthumously as Young Men and Fire, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

Sommaire:
Norman Maclean (1902-90), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in and around Missoula, Montana, and worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forest 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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