Into the Wild

Biography and memoir

First published: 1996
Print length: 207 pagesAnchor Books, 1997

Description

After graduating from Emory, Chris McCandless rejects conventional security, gives away his savings, and travels through the American West. In April 1992, he hitchhikes to Alaska and enters the wilderness with minimal food, equipment, or supplies. Jon Krakauer reconstructs the journey by retracing McCandless’s route, investigating the choices that led him north, and listening to the family and friends left with grief and unanswered questions. He also compares McCandless’s ambitions with his own youthful wilderness experience and considers other people drawn toward disappearance and extreme risk. The resulting inquiry resists reducing its subject to either heroic independence or reckless naïveté, examining the pull of solitude, difficult father-son bonds, and the desire to test oneself beyond society’s protections.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Direct · Journalistic

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Atmospheric · Melancholic · Reflective · Tense

Structure

Braided · Nonlinear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Mystery

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FamilyFreedomGriefIdentityIsolationSurvival

About Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer is an American writer, journalist, and mountaineer whose narrative nonfiction combines investigative reporting with close attention to people operating under pressure. His subjects range from wilderness and high-altitude climbing to religious violence, war, and failures of the justice system. He often builds a larger institutional or cultural inquiry around an intensely examined life or case. Into the Wild reconstructs Chris McCandless’s journey by retracing his route and investigating his choices, while Into Thin Air draws on Krakauer’s firsthand experience of the disastrous 1996 Everest expedition. For Where Men Win Glory, he used journals, letters, interviews, conversations with fellow soldiers, and research in Afghanistan to examine Pat Tillman’s story. Under the Banner of Heaven places a double murder within the history and contested traditions of Mormonism, and Missoula follows sexual-assault cases through police, university, prosecutorial, and court processes. Krakauer’s work moves between intimate narrative and documented systems, setting personal conviction, ambition, and vulnerability against the institutions and communities that shape their consequences.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Anchor Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780385486804

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