Pyne received his bachelor's degree at Stanford University after graduating from Brophy, a Jesuit high school, in Phoenix, Arizona. He later attained his master's and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Texas at Austin. A MacArthur Fellowship came to him in 1988. He has also received a Fulbright Fellowship to Sweden, been awarded two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and has enjoyed two tours at the National Humanities Center. He was a professor at Arizona State University from 1985 through 2018. He spent fifteen seasons as a wildland firefighter at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park between 1967 and 1981. He later spent the summers of 1983-85 writing fire plans for Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone national parks. Pyne credits his entire corpus of work to those years on the Rim. A second body of work focuses on the history of exploration, using the concept of three great ages of discovery as an organizing theme. These writings include his biography of G.K. Gilbert, The Ice, How the Canyon Became Grand, and Voyager. Other works include The Last Lost World which he co-wrote with his daughter, Lydia V. Pyne, and two books on writing nonfiction, Voice and Vision and Style and Story. Since the publication of his second book, Fire in America in 1982, he has been known as one of the world's foremost experts on the history and management of fire. He has written big-screen fire histories for Australia, Canada, Europe, and Earth overall, as well as essays on other lands. He has written or co-authored three textbooks on landscape fire and its management. Recently, he has completed a new survey of the American fire scene with Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America, a narrative play-by-play, and a suite of nine regional reconnaissances under the collective titleTo the Last Smoke. In 2015 he gave a TED Talk on "Fire, a biography." In 2015, in an essay titled "Fire Age"" in Aeon, he introduced the term Pyrocene. In 2019, again in an Aeon article , he elaborated the concept and proposed that humanity's cumulative fire practices, including the burning of fossil fuels, was creating the fire equivalent of an ice age. The concept framed the September 2019 special fire issue of Natural History magazine. In 2020, Pyne rated the 1974–75 bushfires in Australia as "the most destructive event" among historical fires in that country. His papers are housed in the Arizona State University Archives.
