His fictional forest, the Ponderosa National Forest, located adjacent to the Tahoe NF on the north side, was as accurate as any real national forest because his son Jack (later become the USGS “Man” for Nevada) helped him create the terrain and the maps. But to make it creative, unique, challenging, and more interesting, he set the novel in a fictional National Forest rather than real locations like the ones he’d used for Storm. When the Book-of-the-Month club weighed in, promising huge sales, he finally agreed to write it. When Stewart’s publisher and agent and the reading public begged for another novel like Storm, he resisted the call. (That link takes you to a fine in-depth review of NOTL by Christine Smallwood, which also includes a mini-review of Fire.) So he regularly created new types of literary works with each new book – between his first ecological novel, Storm, and the first-ever “autobiography” of humankind, Man, he wrote the first and only history of national place-naming, Names on the Land. Stewart’s normal method of writing was to create something new with each work. Stewart’s second ecological novel was about fire. Stewart’s pioneering and thrilling ecological novel. Now, in the season between the fires, there’s time to share some information about George R. Strohmaier’s The Seasons of Fire, and reflections on the massive fires of 2018 have encouraged this post about Stewart’s Fire.
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