"Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau--and I loved it."
--J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar

"[Connors's] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading."
--Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air

Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford's bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.

For a decade Philip Connors has spent nearly half of each year in a 7' x 7' fire lookout tower, 10,000 feet above sea level, keeping watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in America. Fire Season is his remarkable reflection on work, untamed fire, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with heartfelt reflections on his literary forebears who also served as "freaks on the peaks"--among them Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, and Norman Maclean--Fire Season is a book to stand the test of time.

Connors, Philip

Philip Connors has worked as a baker, a bartender, a house painter, a janitor, and an editor at the Wall Street Journal. His essays have appeared in n+1, Harper's, the Paris Review, and the Best American Non-required Reading anthology. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and their dog.