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Through most of the book, I have tried-and largely succeeded, I think-to minimize my authorial presence.
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McCandless’s strange tale struck a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. The result of this meandering inquiry is the book now before you. In trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-risk activities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly charged bond that exists between fathers and sons. Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession.
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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. Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ran in the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandless remained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on the newsstands by more current journalistic fare. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. He changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet. Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He’d grown up, I learned, in an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he’d excelled academically and had been an elite athlete. His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outside magazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.
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Niederauer, Chief Executive Officer of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. Kenneth Cole (BA 1976), clothing designer and founder of Kenneth Cole Productions Christopher McCandless (1990C), Alaskan wilderness adventurer and main subject of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild Fala Chen (2005C), Chinese American Actress Kirsten Haglund (2013C), Miss America 2008 Duncan L. (1940C), Founder of the Callaway Golf Company Ernie Harwell (1940C), baseball broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers Arnall Patz (BA 1943, MD 1945), ophthalmology researcher and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Lewis Roger Slaton (1949JD), District Attorney, Fulton County, Georgia Lee Hong-koo (1959C), 26th Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea Newt Gingrich (BA 1965), 58th Speaker of the House of Representatives Sonny Carter, NASA astronaut, Crew member of STS-33 Space Shuttle mission (1969C) Peter Buck, guitarist for the band R.E.M. Notable Alumni: Alben Barkley (BA 1900), 35th Vice President of the United States Isaac Stiles Hopkins (1859C) and Robert Stewart Hyer (BA 1881, MA 1882), founding presidents of Georgia Institute of Technology and Southern Methodist University, respectively Young John Allen (1858C), American Methodist Missionary in the late Qing Dynasty, China Thomas Milton Rivers (1909C), Director of the Rockefeller Institute Ernest Cadman Colwell (1923C, 1927PhD), President of the University of Chicago Bobby Jones (Law 1929), the only golfer to win a Grand Slam, founder of the Masters Golf Tournament, and regarded as one of the greatest golfers of all time Ely Callaway Jr.