Jon Krakauer Research Paper

Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer is an author and mountaineer of American birth. He is mostly known for his writings involving outdoors, and primarily mountain climbing. Krakauer wrote Into The Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat.

Jon Krakauer was born in 1954, as the third child out of a total of five, and lived out his childhood in Corvallis, Oregon. Jon’s father, Lewis Krakauer was a doctor and weekend climber, introduced Jon to mountaineering at the age of eight. Jon graduated Hampshire College in 1976, and divided his time between working as carpenter, and salmon fisherman, travelling between Colorado, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest regularly, dedicating all of his free time to climbing.

Jon went against his father’s wishes and pursued his passion in writing and climbing instead of medicine, and went on to accomplish many mountaineering feats.

He wrote for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Outside, Architectural Digest, and many other publications. In 1990, Krakauer published two books: Eiger Dreams, which was a collection of his mountaineering essays, and Iceland: Land of The Sagas, a book of photographs he collected.

In 1996 Jon Krakauer reached the top of Mount Everest, however, during the descent he and his group was caught in a storm that wiped out most of his team, leaving just him and a single team mate. A year after the tragic event, Jon released a novel by the title of Into Thin Air to describe the calamity, and bring light to the general commercialization of Mount Everest; Into Thin Air became a #1 New York bestseller. The novel was translated into twenty four different languages, and has earned numerous awards.

Jon Krakauer received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999; and is currently the editor of Modern Library's Exploration

series.

Jon Krakauer had his pride wounded by his editor's cold response to the early draft of, Under the Banner of Heaven. After publishing Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, his two bestselling works of adventure writing, the editor was confused by this dark story of a 1984 ritual murder, filled with long chapters on the history of Mormonism.

What she didn't understand was that Krakauer was expanding his central themes, not abandoning them with Under the Banner of Heaven: the delicate balance between faith and reason as seen through the eyes of people who are drawn to extremes. Instead of reworking the book, Krakauer found a publisher willing to to cooperate with him and Under the Banner of Heaven became his third bestseller.