About the Author and the Book

In January 1993, a few months after Chris McCandless's body was recovered, Jon Krakauer published an article in Outside magazine reporting on the puzzling circumstances of the young man's death. The article garnered a great deal of attention, and Krakauer found himself fascinated with the question of what led McCandless to this extreme end. "I was haunted by the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own", he explains in his Author's Note of Into the Wild.

This personal connection led Krakauer to do three years of research in an effort to uncover the story behind McCandless's death. He interviewed McCandless's family, friends, and people McCandless came across in his two years on the road. He also had access to McCandless's books, journals, photographs, and the letters he sent and received. Using this and additional information about McCandless's childhood and time at college, Krakauer was able to piece together much of what drove McCandless to his rootless existence, and what he did during that time.

Into the Wild is the result of this extensive research, and was published in 1996. The book also discusses Krakauer’s own history, as he "interrupt[s] McCandless's story with fragments of a narrative drawn from [his] own youth", as well as the stories of many other famous or infamous figures who met their ends in the wilderness.

The book amounted great success, spending more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and adapted to a movie in 2007. Still, controversy arose over Krakauer's diagnosis of what exactly had killed McCandless. In the Outside magazine article, he wrote that McCandless had mistaken the poisonous wild sweat pea for the nearly indistinguishable edible wild potato, and thus had inadvertently poisoned himself. This was what almost all journalists at the time also believed. However, when the potatoes from the area around the bus were later tested in a laboratory, toxins were not found. Krakauer subsequently modified his hypothesis, suggesting that mold on the potato seeds may have caused McCandless to become very sick. This theory was also proved false as no mold was found, and to this day there is no conclusive evidence that explains McCandless's death.