Fire Season - Paperback

by Miles Wilson (Author)

Fire Season is set on a US Forest Service firefighting crew stationed in Southern California and working throughout the West in the mid-1960's. A significant presence in the West, the US Forest Service is little treated in fiction. Many readers have no exposure to the role of the Forest Service in firefighting beyond some gauzy notion of smokejumpers, lookouts, and Smokey the Bear. Yet since WW II, tens of thousands of seasonal firefighters have been the primary line of defense against forest fires of increasing ecological, economic, and human cost. Fire Season focuses on the paradigm for fire crews, an elite hotshot crew specially trained for explosive California chaparral fires. In its fidelity to the physical, emotional, and social world of one of these crews, Fire Season offers an account of the fiery intersection of the human and the natural world--an ongoing encounter that has decisively shaped the natural history--and, therefore, the human history--of the West.

Author Biography

MILES WILSON served three fire seasons (1964, 1965, 1967) as a memeber of the Dalton Hotshots, a U.S. Forest Service Interregional Fire Crew based on the Angeles National Forest in California. While serving with the Dalton Hotshots, Wilson received a Bachelors degree in English at Pomona College and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. He is the author of two previous books, Line of Fall and Harm. Wilson is the recipient of numerous awards for his previous publications, including the John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press for Line of Fall and the Violet Crown Book Award from the Writer's League of Texas/Barnes & Noble for Harm. Wilson currently resides in San Marcos, Texas and teaches English at Texas State Univeristy.