NYRB
The 1945 cover of George R. Stewart's classic work

In 1948, the year that Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead and Dawn Powell released The Locusts Have No King, an English professor at the University of California named George Rippey Stewart published a novel called Fire. The story of an imaginary blaze's path of destruction through Northern California and the men who coordinate an attack to put it out, it closely reworked a book he had written seven years earlier, Storm. It's not much of a fire--"any old-timer could recall a score of greater ones, and would only expect that the years to come would bring many more"--yet the charred trees, imagined as victims of a plague that spared adults and killed all the children, will have consequences for the land that "could be reckoned ahead in centuries."

Fire was a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Its popularity is easy to understand--in many ways it's a potboiler, fast and dirty, with staccato dialogue and plenty of sweat and grime. Yet it contains passages of strange poetry, like this:

Humbug Point saw the blow-up, and Lovers Leap. Horse Mountain reported, and signed off, quoting Joel 2:30--"and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke." Far to the north, Sheer Rock saw it suddenly above the high shoulder of Howell Mountain. Hamlin Point saw it build up above the round top of Cerro Gordo, like the towering smoke of a new-born volcano.

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