John Krakauer

Jon Krakauer was born in 1954 in Corvallis, Oregon. He graduated from Hampshire College in 1976. After graduating, he moved between Colorado, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest working as a carpenter and a commercial salmon fisherman. He developed a love for climbing mountains which led him to climbing Mount Everest in 1996. While climbing, a storm killed four of his five teammates who had reached the summit with him. He wrote an article for Outside magazine about the climb and received a national magazine award. Following this he wrote a novel about the tragedy called Into Thin Air, which was a New York Times Bestseller. Krakauer also wrote the novel Into the Wild about a man who survived in the Alaskan wilderness for 119, which was on the best seller list for two years. His writings have been published in Outside, GQ, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and more. In 1997 he received the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism for an article he wrote for Smithsonian on volcanology. In 2003 he published, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, in 2009 Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, and in 2011, Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost his Way.