Into Thin Air Study Guide

Jon Krakauer grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied environmental science at Hampshire College. As a young man, he developed a passion for mountain climbing, and throughout the 1970s he traveled to Alaska, Patagonia, and Mount Everest in search of difficult climbs. During these years, Krakauer supported himself almost entirely as a fisherman and a carpenter. Beginning in the early 1980s, however, he began contributing articles about mountaineering and the natural world to the magazine Outside, and by the end of the decade, he was supporting himself by writing full time. In 1996, Krakauer was involved in a major mountaineering disaster at Mount Everest, in which four of his teammates died in the middle of a snowstorm. Krakauer would eventually publish his version of these events in the bestselling book Into Thin Air (1996). Since the late 90s, Krakauer has published successful books on a number of topics, including the Mormon Church, the death of the marine Pat Tillman, and the life of Christopher McCandless (which formed the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film Into the Wild, starring Emily Hirsch). Krakauer continues to write prolifically; his most recent book, on college rape cases, was published in 2015.

The book mentions several important milestones in mountaineering history, including the 1982 discovery that Mount Everest was the highest peak in the world, and, in 1953, the successful excursion to the summit of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary. As Krakauer argues, Hillary and Norgay’s monumental achievement became a rallying point for Great Britain (Hillary was from New Zealand, a part of the British Commonwealth), and Hillary himself became a poster-child for the British Commonwealth.

Krakauer is a fan of the adventure novels of Jack London, a late 19th-century American novelist whose books include The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904), and White Fang (1906). Like Krakauer's work, London's books often feature vivid descriptions of the snowy wilderness, and include exciting scenes revolving around natural disasters, such as storms and blizzards. Another important text is The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest (1997) by Anatoli Boukreev, a mountaineer who appears in Into Thin Air. In response to Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest disaster, Boukreev offers his own version of the events, and argues that his behavior saved many lives, rather than endangering lives, as Krakauer alleges. There is still a vigorous debate in the mountaineering world surrounding Boukreev and Krakauer's competing versions of the Everest disaster.