Into the wild authors note

In April , a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt McKinley.

Into the wild authors note

Four months later his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters.

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.

His name turned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. 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.

Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in the summer of , McCandless dropped out of sight.

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. And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the ragged margin of our society, wandering across North Ameri