Norman Maclean was seventy-four years old when he began researching the 1949 Mann Gulch fire, in which thirteen young smokejumpers died on a Montana hillside. He spent his last years trying to understand what happened and to honor the dead by telling their story truly. Young Men and Fire, published posthumously, is part investigative journalism, part meditation on craft and mortality, part elegy for young men he never met. Maclean, who spent decades as a professor of English at the University of Chicago, brought literary sensibility to fire science. He reconstructed the fire's spread by consulting experts, studying records, and walking the terrain. He explored why the men died, trapped between fire and ridge with minutes to live. Foreman Wagner Dodge lit an escape fire and lay down in its ashes, surviving; the others ran and perished. Why did no one follow Dodge? This question haunted Maclean and drives his investigation. The book is also about writing itself, about the difficulty of finding words adequate to catastrophe, about the relationship between scientific understanding and literary truth. Maclean died before finishing; his editor's note describes how the manuscript was assembled. Readers interested in nature writing, fire ecology, or the craft of nonfiction will find this book a masterpiece of the form.