Jon Krakauer

Biography

Jon Krakauer (born 1954) grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, the son of a doctor who wanted him to follow a medical or academic path. He became obsessed with mountain climbing as a teenager and spent his twenties working manual jobs — carpenter, fisherman, cannery worker — to fund climbing expeditions. His relationship with his father was strained by his rejection of conventional success. He became a writer partly because it allowed him to climb for work. His magazine assignment on McCandless became personally consuming when he recognized in McCandless not a tragedy to report but a version of himself he might have been. His own near-death solo climb of the Devil's Thumb in Alaska is the book's emotional anchor.

Jon Krakauer at a glance