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Into the Wild

Into the Wild

Biography & MemoirBiography
Pages
205
Published
1996
Language
English

Synopsis

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 Mount McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. His name was Christopher McCandless. He had given away his savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself under the name Alexander Supertramp.

Jon Krakauer retraces McCandless's two-year odyssey across the American West and into the Alaskan bush, drawing on the young man's journals, letters, and the accounts of the people who met him along the way. The result is a haunting, meticulously reported portrait of an idealistic, headstrong seeker — one that refuses easy judgment about whether he was a courageous visionary or a reckless naif.

Weaving in his own experiences and the stories of other men drawn to the edges of the map, Krakauer turns a single lonely death into a profound meditation on risk, family, the pull of the wild, and the American myth of self-reliance.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

ReflectiveMelancholicAdventurousThought-ProvokingAtmospheric
SurvivalRoad TripComing of Age

Genres

Biography & Memoir Biography Nature Adventure History Travel

About the author

J
Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer (born April 12, 1954, in Brookline, Massachusetts) is an American writer, journalist and mountaineer. Raised in Corvallis, Oregon, he took up climbing young and became known for his magazine work, much of it for Outside, some of which was collected in Eiger Dreams (1990). His books of narrative nonfiction include Into the Wild (1996), an account of Christopher McCandless's death in the Alaskan wilderness; Into Thin Air (1997), his first-hand report of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster...

Frequently asked questions

  • Is Into the Wild a true story?

    Yes. It is a work of narrative non-fiction. Jon Krakauer reconstructs the real life and death of Christopher Johnson McCandless, a 24-year-old who hitchhiked to Alaska in April 1992 and whose body was found near the Stampede Trail four months later. Krakauer drew on McCandless's own journals, letters and photographs, and on interviews with his family and the people who met him on the road.

  • Did Into the Wild start as a magazine article?

    Yes. Krakauer first told the story in "Death of an Innocent", a roughly 9,000-word piece in the January 1993 issue of Outside magazine. The book, published three years later, expands that reporting considerably — adding McCandless's family background, the accounts of people who travelled with him, and chapters on Krakauer's own youthful climb of Devils Thumb in Alaska.

  • Does Jon Krakauer appear in the book himself?

    Yes, but only in part. Most of the book is reported third-person narrative about McCandless. In two chapters Krakauer turns to his own past, recounting a solo attempt on the Devils Thumb in Alaska as a young man, in order to weigh how far he can claim to understand what drove McCandless. That is why the book is usually shelved as reportage rather than as a memoir.

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