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contradictory. Although I may have my own sense of where the truth lies, and I always go to great
lengths to report the facts as accurately as I can, I accept that nothing I write is ever going to be the
last word. I nevertheless aspire to persuade readers to regard old truths in a skeptical light, and to at
least consider other, newer perspectives that I believe have more merit.
Do you think of yourself as a New Journalist as Tom Wolfe defined it?
No. My work isn’t much like Wolfe’s. I don’t have the skill, or the chutzpah, to attempt the literary
fireworks that are his stock in trade. I think Wolfe’s finest book, The Right Stuff, is absolutely
brilliant— it’s one of the seminal works of nonfiction written this century, certainly—but time hasn’t
been terribly kind to most of Wolfe’s writing. Upon rereading his work today it can seem overly
mannered and self-conscious, and sometimes completely over-the-top. When I was starting out I was
more impressed by flashy writing—I thought what a writer said was less important than how he said
it. Nowadays I’m inclined to applaud clarity, economy, and subtlety (to say nothing of substance)
more than literary flash.
But Tom Wolfe and the other pioneers of New Journalism broke the ground that allowed me to
write a book like Into the Wild, which isn’t a flamboyant piece of writing by any measure, but does
have some quirks that don’t seem quite so weird and quirky in the wake of the New Journalists. In that
sense I’m indebted to Wolfe’s bold innovations.
What writers have influenced you?
I learned almost everything I know not only about reporting, but about the craft of writing in
general, by reading luminaries like Joan Didion, Tracy Kidder, David Quammen, Richard Ben
Cramer, Philip Caputo, Tom Wolfe, Edward Hoagland, Barry Lopez, Janet Malcolm, Neil Sheehan,
Michael Herr, David Roberts, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, William Styron, Annie Dillard, John
McPhee, Charles Bowden, William Kittredge, Paul Theroux, Joy Williams, Tim Cahill, Terry
Tempest Williams, E. Jean Carroll, and Peter Matthiessen. Whenever I would come across a passage
by one of these writers that blew my socks off, I would read the sentences over and over until I
understood what gave the writing such power. That’s how I learned technique. I paid close attention
to what these authors quoted and whom, where they went, what they observed. I studied how they
began their books and/or articles, and how they ended them. Reading these writers is what I did
instead of attending journalism school.
If there is an historic tradition of long-form nonfiction that you’d put yourself in, who else is in
it?
There is of course no way to answer a question like that without sounding like a presumptuous ass.
I will say, however, that I’ve been inspired by such notable writers as Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who
in 1568 wrote The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico; Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the
incomparable Democracy in America; Francis Parkman, the nineteenth-century prose stylist who
wrote The Oregon Trail and LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West; the underappreciated
Russian explorer Valerian Albanov, author of In the Land of White Death; Wallace Stegner, who in