Jon Krakauer is a indefatigable outdoorsman with an insatiable love of nature and a prolific writer who balances journalistic instinct for a good story with humane sensitivity for his subjects. His writing career has circled a lifelong passion for adventure, the wilderness, and mountain climbing— his most abiding interest.

Krakauer was born in Massachusetts in 1954, moved to Oregon with his family shortly thereafter, and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Krakauer has recorded in his books Into the Wild and Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster how his lifelong passion for climbing was born in the mountains of the Northwest. He was influenced early in his life by the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest's forbidding West Ridge by the American Into the Wild, 1996 Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, 1997team of Tom...