John Norman Maclean is a journalist and author who has written five books on fatal wildland fires and a memoir, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River (June 2021, published by HarperCollins).
He married Frances Ellen McGeachie in 1968; they have two sons—Daniel, a science teacher in Anchorage, Alaska, and John Fitzroy, a public defender for the state of Maryland.
Maclean was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University for the 1974-1975 academic year and became the Tribune’s Foreign Editor in Chicago in 1988.
He resigned from the newspaper after the 1994 South Canyon Fire on Colorado's Storm King Mountain killed 14 firefighters.
An avid flyfisherman, he currently divides his time between Washington, D.C., and the family cabin at the edge of Seeley Lake, Montana.