Jon Krakauer Biography

One of the best-selling and most lauded American nonfiction authors, Jon Krakauer was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1954, and raised in Corvallis, Oregon, where he took up mountaineering at a very early age. He first became well known as a writer for the outdoors magazine Outside. In 1990, Krakauer's work as a journalist for Outside and other publications was collected and published in a book called Eiger Dreams. In 1996, he published Into the Wild, which spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and remains one of the central works of recent American nonfiction. It also accrued to its author several awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Krakauer’s other works include the nonfiction bestsellers Into Thin Air, his first-hand 1997 account of the deadliest Everest ascent of all time; Under the Banner of Heaven, an investigation of the nature of Mormonism and polygamy; Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009), about the NFL quarterback who died while serving as a U.S. Army Ranger in Afghanistan in 2004; and Missoula, which examines how rape cases are treated by colleges and the criminal justice system. In 2007, Into the Wild was adapted into a nonfiction feature film directed by Sean Penn. Into Thin Air was the subject of a television movie called Into Thin Air: Death on Everest the same year the book was published. Under the Banner of Heaven was the basis for 2022 seven-part miniseries that is available on Hulu.

Background on Into the Wild

Into the Wild tells the true story of the journey of 24-year-old Christopher McCandless into Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve, where he starved to death in an abandoned bus after spending four months foraging and hunting game. Intelligent but burdened by anger at his brilliant but overbearing and imperfect father, McCandless went entirely without human contact for four months attempting to purify himself of what he felt were the evils of civilization. American nonfiction writer Jon Krakauer meticulously reconstructs every stage of McCandless’s journey and relates other, shorter trips McCandless made before determining that he would spend the rest of his life in the wild.

A pre-eminent journalist of the American outdoors, Krakauer first published widely popular article about McCandless in the magazine Outside in 1993 after reading an article about his death in the New York Times. Into the Wild extends Krakauer’s original investigation of McCandless’s life and death into a meditation on American male adolescence, the complications of father-son relationships, and the role of nature and the wilderness as furthering the great American myth of self-reliance.

In the 1990s, questions of changing gender relationships and the role of manhood and manliness in sustaining national and cultural identity were very much in the air, part of a long series of cultural changes begun by the counter-cultural movements initiated after World War II. By the time Christopher McCandless made his trip into Denali National Park, the American frontier could no longer be said to exist. Into the Wild documents both the disappearance of the American ideal of masculine self-reliance and a rising, late 20th century awareness of environmental crisis.

The internal structure of Into the Wild is both carefully arranged and complex, drawing from multiple American literary traditions both mainstream and high-brow to craft a landmark example of 20th century American mixed-genre nonfiction. Krakauer works through intensely emotional material gathered from first-hand interviews to examine the consequences of McCandless’s death on the people close to him, rendering Into the Wild a study of risk-taking behavior and its effects as much as it is an adventure story. 

In some ways, Into the Wild can also be considered a work of literary criticism or intellectual biography. Krakauer scrutinizes the same books McCandless is known to have read, including the fiction of Leo Tolstoy and the nonfiction of Henry David Thoreau, lending Into the Wild a scholarly, even intellectual tone that is not generally present in mainstream writing about the outdoors. The history of American nature writing, especially regarding the American West, also influences Into the Wild. Krakauer himself cites Thoreau, Wallace Stegner, and John Muir. In keeping with the genre of investigative biography, Krakauer also details McCandless’s early life and interviews his family as well as the helpful strangers who became his friends during his travels.

In addition to the portrait he offers of McCandless’s journey and psychology, Krakauer also relates an extreme outdoor adventure of his own, rendering the book an example of memoir or personal essay. When Krakauer was in his early twenties, he nearly died during an attempt to summit the Devils Thumb, a mountain in Alaska near the border with British Columbia. Into the Wild thus blends personal essay and investigative nonfiction with biography and autobiography. This genre, which appears in many different forms, can be traced back to some American literary influences and origins, including the magazine writers Studs Terkel, Tom Wolfe, and Susan Orlean. Insofar as Into the Wild attempts to resolve the mystery of how McCandless died, it shares a tradition with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and American true crime stories generally.

Like many nonfiction works developed from magazine fiction, the style of Into the Wild is largely objective. Its rigorous description of camping, hitchhiking, and the American outdoors remains one of Krakauer’s signatures as a writer. The book’s artful, nonlinear narrative is not typical of most 20th century journalistic writing and represents another of Krakauer’s more recognizable traits. Into the Wild includes additional research into what McCandless could have eaten that led to his death by starvation, a mystery Krakauer could not resolve by the publication of the original Outside article. Krakauer’s own fixation on McCandless’s story and his engagement with doubters and critics of McCandless’s life also informs the book’s revisions.