October 20th, 2007

Under A Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894

From Daniel James Brown...

For me, the Great Hinckley Firestorm is personal. It cost my great-grandfather his life. My great-grandmother and my grandfather escaped on a burning train, but their lives were never again the same.

Several years ago I set out to learn more about what exactly happened to them on that hot, dusty first day of September, 1894, when their world exploded in flames. As I dug through musty old newspapers, tattered books, and faded letters, I discovered an extraordinary tale about an almost unbelievable event, and I've recorded that tale in UNDER A FLAMING SKY. I hope you enjoy reading the book. If you have comments or questions about it or about the firestorm please feel free to send me email.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Diablo Valley College, the University of California at Berkeley, and UCLA. I taught writing at San Jose State University and Stanford and co-authored two textbooks: Criteria for Writers (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1987) and Connections: A Rhetoric and Short Prose Reader (Houghton Mifflin, 1984). I am working now on a second historical narrative that will be published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in 2008/2009.

I live in the country east of Redmond, Washington with my wife and two daughters and an assortment of cats, dogs, chickens, sheep, and honeybees. When I am not writing, I am likely to be birding, gardening, reading American history, reading Shakespeare, or chasing coyotes away from the sheep.