Fire

George R. Stewart

ago 2024 · New York Review of Books

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From the author of Storm, a breathtaking novel about a raging fire and the path of destruction and change it leaves in its wake.

Spitcat, a raging forest fire in the Sierra Nevada of California, had a lifespan of merely eleven days, "yet its effects could be reckoned ahead in centuries." So writes George R. Stewart in this engrossing novel of a fire started by lightning in the dry heat of September, and fanned out of control by unexpected winds. The book begins with the origins of the fire--smoldering quietly at first, unnoticed, then suddenly bursting into a terrifying inferno, devouring trees and animals over acre after acre and leaving nothing but desolation in its wake. Firefighters and lookouts, forest rangers and smokejumpers—as well as animals in the forest, many of them the bewildered victims of the blaze, and all the varied trees and bushes there—are characters of this realistic story.

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George R. Stewart (1895-1980) was born in Pennsylvania and educated at Princeton. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia in 1922 and joined the English faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1924. He was a sociologist, toponymist, and founding member of the American Name Society, and the author of more than twenty books, including Storm and Names on the Land, both available in the NYRB Classics series.

Emma Rothschild is an economic historian who currently serves as the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University. She has published five books, most of which cover economic European history and the development of economic thought.