Jon Krakauer

American journalist and mountaineer whose Into Thin Air and Into the Wild are landmark works of adventure nonfiction combining rigorous reporting with intimate first-person witness.

Jon Krakauer is a climber and journalist who has written some of the most gripping narrative nonfiction of the past thirty years. Into Thin Air, published in 1997, is his first-person account of the 1996 Everest expedition during which eight climbers died in a single storm — an expedition Krakauer was on as a journalist for Outside magazine. The book is a model of narrative nonfiction: technically detailed enough to convey the physical and logistical reality of high-altitude climbing, psychologically acute enough to understand what drives people to risk their lives this way, and personally honest about Krakauer’s own role in events he witnessed.

Into the Wild, published in 1996, is a different kind of book — a biography reconstructed from physical evidence, interviews, and the journals of Christopher McCandless, a young man who abandoned his life, gave away his savings, and walked into the Alaskan wilderness, where he starved to death in 1992. Krakauer brings the same investigative rigor to the story and supplements it with reflection on his own youthful self-destructiveness. The book sparked genuine debate about whether McCandless was admirable or reckless — a debate Krakauer engages with rather than avoiding.

Krakauer writes with unusual self-awareness about the limitations of his own perspective and the fallibility of memory and judgment under extreme conditions. Into Thin Air in particular acknowledges his own potential culpability in events he describes, which is a harder thing to do than it looks.