Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books, including the travel memoirs African Calliope and Notes from the Century Before, the essay collections Walking the Dead Diamond River and The Tugman s Passage, and the novels Cat Man and Seven Rivers West. He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world writing for a number of national magazines including Harper s and Esquire. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and taught at many American colleges and universities. He is a native New Yorker, who now divides his time between Martha s Vineyard and his farmhouse in the mountains in Burton, Vermont.
Writer David Quammen grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and was later educated at both Yale and Oxford Universities. Quammen began his career by writing for The Christian Science Monitor, the National Center for Appropriate Technology, and Audubon, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Harpers Magazines. He wrote the novels The Soul of Viktor Tronko and The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, which won the 1997 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. He also received two National Magazine Awards for his column "Natural Acts" in Outside magazine.
Jon Krakauer was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1954. He received a degree in environmental studies from Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1976. He worked as a carpenter and fisherman. He also wrote articles on mountain climbing, which appeared in several publications including GQ, National Geographic, Architectural Digest, Playboy, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. In 1996, he climbed Mt. Everest, but a storm took the lives of four of the five teammates who reached the summit with him. An analysis of the calamity he wrote for Outside magazine received a National Magazine Award. An article he wrote for Smithsonian about volcanology received the 1997 Walter Sullivan Award for… Excellence in Science Journalism. He is the author of several books including Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, When Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, and Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way. His book, Into the Wild, was made into a movie in 2007.