Jon Krakauer
Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He is the author of bestselling nonfiction books—Into the Wild; Into Thin Air; Under the Banner of Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest.
Early life
Krakauer was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, as the third of five children of Carol Ann and Lewis Joseph Krakauer. His father was Jewish and his mother was a Unitarian of Scandinavian descent. He was raised in Corvallis, Oregon. His father introduced the young Krakauer to mountaineering at the age of eight. His father was "relentlessly competitive and ambitious in the extreme" and placed high expectations on Krakauer, wishing for his son to attend Harvard Medical School and become a doctor. Krakauer wrote that this was his father's view of "life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness." He competed in tennis at Corvallis High School, and graduated in 1972. He went on to study at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where in 1976 he received his degree in environmental studies. In 1977, he met former climber Linda Mariam Moore, and they married in 1980. They lived in Seattle, Washington, but moved to Boulder, Colorado, after the release of Krakauer's book Into Thin Air.Mountaineering
After graduating from college in 1977, Krakauer spent three weeks alone in the wilderness of the Stikine Icecap region of Alaska and climbed a new route on the Devils Thumb, an experience he described in Eiger Dreams and in Into the Wild. In 1992, he made his way to Cerro Torre in the Andes of Patagonia—a sheer granite peak considered to be one of the most difficult technical climbs in the world.In 1996, Krakauer took part in a guided ascent of Mount Everest. His group was one of those caught in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which a violent storm trapped a number of climbers high on the slopes of the mountain. Krakauer reached the peak and returned to camp, but four of his teammates died while making their descent in the storm.
A candid recollection of the event was published in Outside magazine and, later, in the book Into Thin Air. By the end of the 1996 climbing season, fifteen people had died on the mountain, making it the deadliest single year in Everest history to that point. This has since been exceeded by the sixteen deaths in the 2014 Mount Everest avalanche, and the 2015 earthquake avalanche disaster in which twenty-two people were killed. Krakauer has publicly criticized the commercialization of Mount Everest.
Journalism
In 1999, he received an Arts and Letters award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Books
''Eiger Dreams''
Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains is a nonfiction collection of articles and essays by Jon Krakauer on mountaineering and rock climbing. It concerns a variety of topics, from ascending the Eiger Nordwand in the Swiss Alps, Denali in Alaska or K2 in the Karakoram, to the well-known rock climbers Krakauer has met on his trips, such as John Gill.''Into the Wild''
Into the Wild was published in 1996 and spent two years on The New York Times Best Seller List. The book employs a non-linear narrative that documents the travels of Christopher McCandless, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family who, in 1990, after graduating from Emory University, donated all of the money in his bank account to the humanitarian charity Oxfam, renamed himself "Alexander Supertramp", and began a journey in the American West. McCandless' remains were found in September 1992; he had died of starvation in Alaska on the Stampede Trail. In the book, Krakauer draws parallels between McCandless' experiences and his own, and the experiences of other adventurers. Into The Wild was adapted into a film of the same name, which was released on September 21, 2007.''Into Thin Air''
In 1997, Krakauer expanded his September 1996 Outside article into Into Thin Air. The book describes the climbing parties' experiences and the general state of Everest mountaineering at the time. Hired as a journalist by the magazine, Krakauer had participated as a client of the 1996 Everest climbing team led by Rob Hall—the team which ended up suffering the greatest casualties in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.The book reached the top of The New York Times
Krakauer has contributed royalties from this book to the Everest '96 Memorial Fund at the Boulder Community Foundation, which he founded as a tribute to his deceased climbing partners.
In a TV-movie version of the book, Krakauer was played by Christopher McDonald. Everest, a feature film based on the events of the disaster directed by Baltasar Kormákur, was released in 2015. In the film, Krakauer is portrayed by Michael Kelly. Krakauer denounced the movie, saying some of its details were fabricated and defamatory. He also expressed regret regarding Sony's rapid acquisition of the rights to the book. Director Baltasar Kormákur responded, claiming Krakauer's first-person account was not used as source material for the film.
In the book, Krakauer noted that Russian-Kazakhstani guide Anatoli Boukreev, Scott Fischer's top guide on the expedition, ascended the summit without supplemental oxygen, "which didn't seem to be in clients' best interest". He also wrote that Boukreev descended from the summit several hours ahead of his clients, and that this was "extremely unorthodox behavior for a guide". He noted however that, once he had descended to the top camp, Boukreev was heroic in his tireless attempts to rescue the missing climbers. Five months after Into Thin Air was published, Boukreev gave his own account of the Everest disaster in the book The Climb, co-written with G. Weston DeWalt.
Differences centered on what experienced mountaineers thought about the facts of Boukreev's performance. As photographer Galen Rowell wrote, "the fact that every one of Boukreev's clients survived without major injuries while the clients who died or received major injuries were members of your party. Could you explain how Anatoli 's shortcomings as a guide led to the survival of his clients…?" In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Rowell cited numerous inconsistencies in Krakauer's narrative, observing that Krakauer was sleeping in his tent while Boukreev was rescuing other climbers. Rowell argued that Boukreev's actions were nothing short of heroic, and his judgment prescient: " foresaw problems with clients nearing camp, noted five other guides on the peak , and positioned himself to be rested and hydrated enough to respond to an emergency. His heroism was not a fluke." After the publication of Into Thin Air and The Climb, DeWalt, Boukreev, and Krakauer became embroiled in disagreements about Krakauer's portrayal of Boukreev. Krakauer had reached a détente with Boukreev in November 1997, but the Russian climber was killed by an avalanche only a few weeks later while climbing Annapurna. In addition to Boukreev, a couple of expedition members took issue with Krakauer's depiction of the events, including Gau Ming-ho and Sandy Hill Pittman.
Many others are supportive of Krakauer's account. This includes, Neal Beidleman who confirms Krakauer’s accuracy and echoes concerns about Boukreev. David Breashears said his film Storm Over Everest was "complimentary to Into Thin Air. Jon Krakauer is a very good friend of mine." Beck Weathers said Krakauer portrayed his ordeal honestly. Beidleman, Breahshears, and Weathers were all on Everest and survived the storm. Peter Athans, one of the most accomplished American Himalayan mountaineers of the modern era, affirmed that Krakauer did not exaggerate or misrepresent the storm.
In 2015 Krakauer said: “I wish I’d never gone. I suffered for years, I still suffer from what happened. I’m glad I wrote a book about it, but you know, if I could go back and relive my life, I never would have climbed Everest.”
''Under the Banner of Heaven''
In 2003, Under the Banner of Heaven became Krakauer's third nonfiction bestseller. The book examines extremes of religious belief, specifically fundamentalist offshoots of Mormonism. Krakauer looks at the practice of polygamy in these offshoots and scrutinizes it in the context of the Latter Day Saints religion throughout its history. Much of the focus of the book is on the Lafferty brothers, who murdered Erica and Brenda Lafferty on July 24, 1984 in the name of their fundamentalist faith.In 2006, Tom Elliott and Pawel Gula produced a documentary inspired by the book, Damned to Heaven.
Robert Millet, Professor of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University, an LDS institution, reviewed the book and described it as confusing, poorly organized, misleading, erroneous, prejudicial and insulting. Mike Otterson, Director of Media Relations for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told the Associated Press, "This book is not history, and Krakauer is no historian. He is a storyteller who cuts corners to make the story sound good. His basic thesis appears to be that people who are religious are irrational, and that irrational people do strange things."
In response, Krakauer criticized the LDS Church hierarchy, citing the opinion of D. Michael Quinn, a historian who was excommunicated in 1993, who wrote that "The tragic reality is that there have been occasions when Church leaders, teachers, and writers have not told the truth they knew about difficulties of the Mormon past, but have offered to the Saints instead a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials." Krakauer wrote, "I happen to share Dr. Quinn's perspective".
In April 2022, a limited series of Under the Banner of Heaven was released by Hulu starring Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones.