Into the Wild Book: Author's Note

This is the author's note directly from the Into the Wild book. I think it serves as a great introduction to this story and also outlines Jon Krakauer's stance on this subject, an issue which has been of much controversy:

"In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.

Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy's death. His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He'd grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he'd excelled academically and had been an elite athlete.

Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska.

Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran in the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandless remained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on the newsstands by more current journalistic fare. I was haunted by the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession. IN trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you.

I won't claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless's strange tale struck a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. Through most of the book, I have tried--and largely succeeded, I think--to minimize my authorial presence. But let the readers be warned: I interrupt McCandless's story with the fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.

He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence. Long captivated by the writing of Leo Tolstoy, McCandless particularly admired how the great novelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander among the destitute. In college McCandless began emulating Tolstoy's asceticism and moral rigor to a degree that fist astonished, and then alarmed, those who were close to him. When the boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusions that he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril, adversity, and Tolstoyan renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. And that is what he found, in abundance.

For most of the sixteen-week ordeal, nevertheless, McCandless more than held his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two seemingly insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in August 1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April. Instead, his innocent mistakes turned out to be pivotal and irreversible, his name became the stuff of tabloid headlines, and his bewildered family was left clutching the shards of a fierce and painful love.

A surprising number of people have been affected by the story of Chris McCandless's life and death. In the weeks and months following the publication of the article in Outside, it generated more mail than any other article in the magazine's history. This correspondence, as one might expect, reflected sharply divergent points of view: Some readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and Noble ideals; others fulminated that e was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity--and was undeserving of the considerable media attention he received. My convictions should be apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the reader to form his or her own opinion of Chris McCandless.

Jon Krakauer
Seattle
April 1995"

If you are interested in reading the Into the Wild book for yourself, see the links below, or browse the categories to the left for more ruminations about Chris McCandless's life.

Chris McCandless Photos

Here is a small collection of Chris McCandless photos....









More McCandless photos coming soon....

Into the Wild: Krakauer--Short Biography

Before writing Into the Wild, Krakauer was a best-selling author and long-time writer for Outside magazine. He was born and raised in Corvallis, Oregon and received a degree in environmental studies from Hampshire College in Massachusetts. After college, he worked as a carpenter and commercial salmon fisherman.

Krakauer began his writing career with Outside magazine, but his early freelance work was also featured in Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Architectural Digest. In later years, his articles appeared in GEO, TIME, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.





Jon Krakauer developed a passion for mountaineering at eight years old, and, starting with his writing for Outside Magazine, focused his craft on a love for the outdoors. One of the defining points in his life was three weeks he spent in solitude on the Stikine Icecap in Southeast Alaska and a dangerous decision to forge a new path up the Devil's Thumb alone, an experience which almost took his life. Another well-known climb of his was up the Cerro Torre in the Andes, one of the world's toughest technical summits.

Of course, Krakauer's most famous venture was the ill-fated Mount Everest disaster described in Into Thin Air when four of Krakauer's teammates met their deaths on the peak in a bad storm. First recalling the tragic event in an Outside magazine article which earned a National Magazine Award, he later turned it into a best-selling book. Fifteen people died on Everest climbs that same year--more people that died any other year in Everest history--Krakauer became an open critic of those promoting the challenging peak for commercial gain. This is ironic considering the number of critics who berate Krakauer and Sean Penn for what some see as glamorization of young Chris McCandless' tragic mistakes.

After Into Thin Air reached best-seller status, it was dubbed as "Book of the Year" by TIME magazine, one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review, a finalist for a 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award, and one of three finalists for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction. It is now available in twenty-four different languages and truly holds a place in the top ranks of modern non-fiction.

Into the Wild, another story about taking unnecessary risks and facing the consequences, also started as an article in Time Magazine. As he explores Chris Joseph McCandless' spiritual and physical journey, trying to find sense of the risks McCandless took when he walked into the wild, Krakauer recounts his own foolish decision to climb the Devil's Thumb alone and attempts to use the parallels between their experiences to reach a greater understanding. Krakauer expresses a great admiration for McCandless' spiritual journey and strives to show he was not just another nutcase walking unprepared into the Alaskan wilderness. Into the Wild became another best-seller.

Today, Krakauer is known for his charity work. He participates in the American Himalayan Foundation and the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation, and after the Everest disaster he formed the Everest '96 Memorial Fund using royalties from Into Thin Air to assist impoverished Himalayans and support environmental organizations.

Krakauer has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, who stated that "Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer. His account of an ascent of Mount Everest has led to a general reevaluation of climbing and of the commercialization of what was once a romantic, solitary sport; while his account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, who died of starvation after challenging the Alaskan wilderness, delves even more deeply and disturbingly into the fascination of nature and the devastating effects of its lure on a young and curious mind."

Other notable works include Eiger Dreams, a collection of mountaineering essays, and a book of photographs called Iceland: Land of the Sagas. In his latest book, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Krakauer examines his experiences with religious fundamentalism and the power it has to shape lives. He is also the editor of the Modern Library Exploration series, a collection of previously out of print exploration/adventure classics which explore "the shifting rationales given by explorers over the ages for why anyone would willingly subject himself to such unthinkable hazards and hardships."

With the success of Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, Krakauer has established himself as a modern literary legend, and his career will surely bring future success.

Into the Wild Online Store

Go see my Into the Wild online store!

All my products are through Amazon, a trusted platform, and are related to the story which has touched so many lives. Order the Into the Wild book, Into the Wild Video, Into the Wild Music Soundtrack, Into the Wild posters, mp3s, and more...


If it is somehow related to this book, you will find it in the Into the Wild online store.

Thanks for visiting! :-)

The "Into the Wild" Book

From the "Into the Wild" book jacket:

"In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and , unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the dries and desires that propelled McCandless. Digging deeply, he takes an inherently compelling mystery and unravels the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.

When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity , and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's storytelling blaze through every page."

This story has been a shaping force of my life and the lives of a movement of people who were inspired by Mccandless' effort to grasp genuine experience and embrace his philosophies. This "Into the Wild" book blog will serve as a gateway to those who have not yet heard this story and a reminder to those it has touched.