Jon Krakauer

American · b. 1954

Jon Krakauer was a carpenter-mountaineer who once soloed Alaska's Devils Thumb for reasons he later recognized in Chris McCandless — the subject of Into the Wild. A year after publishing it he survived the 1996 Everest disaster he'd been assigned to cover, and wrote Into Thin Air; his method never changes: obsessive reporting, self-implication, and doubt kept honestly on the page.