Christopher McCandless, Whose Alaskan Odyssey Ended in Death
“No one is yet certain who he was,” said an Associated Press article that appeared in The New York Times on Sept. 13, 1992. “But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive.”
The young man in question was Christopher McCandless. His identity was not confirmed for weeks, but in time he would become internationally famous as a bold, or very imprudent, figure.
Mr. McCandless died alone in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail, a desolate stretch of backcountry near Denali, in August 1992. He was surrounded by his meager provisions: a .22-caliber rifle; some well-worn and annotated paperbacks; a camera and five rolls of exposed film; and the diary, 113 cryptic notes on the back pages of a book that identified edible plants.
Before Mr. McCandless died, from starvation aggravated by accidental poisoning, he had survived for more than 110 days on nothing but a 10-pound sack of rice and what he could hunt and forage in the unforgiving taiga.
Jon Krakauer, at the time a freelance writer, heard about Mr. McCandless’s story from an editor at Outside magazine who had read the Associated Press piece. The editor wanted Mr. Krakauer to write a long article about Mr. McCandless on a tight deadline, and he delivered.
But after the story ran, Mr. Krakauer needed to learn more.
“I decided I wanted to write this book because I felt like there was a lot more to tell; there was a lot I hadn’t discovered,” Mr. Krakauer said in a telephone interview.
Over the next few years he dug into Mr. McCandless’s life and discovered a complicated, compelling story. He chronicled Mr. McCandless’s travels and lonely death in “Into the Wild” (1996), a national best-seller that has since sold millions of copies in the United States. A film based on the book, starring Emile Hirsch as Mr. McCandless and directed by Sean Penn, was released in 2008.
Mr. McCandless’s story continues to fascinate, confound and infuriate readers two decades after “Into the Wild” was first published. Mr. Krakauer said it was by far his best-selling work, adding, “I get more hate mail from this book than probably from anything else.”
“He’s this Rorschach test: People read into him what they see,” he said of Mr. McCandless. “Some people see an idiot, and some people see themselves. I’m the latter, for sure.”
Mr. McCandless came from a well-off family on the East Coast. He graduated from Emory University with honors, then disappeared in 1990. He donated virtually all the money in his bank account to Oxfam, a charity dedicated to fighting poverty, then drove west before abandoning his car and burning the cash he had left. He deserted his family and a privileged life without looking back.
Mr. McCandless canoed into Mexico, hitchhiked north and worked odd jobs along the way. He often roamed alone, but left an impression on many of the friends he made along the way. An older man named Ron Franz even offered to adopt him; Mr. McCandless gently turned him down.
He never contacted his parents, Walt and Billie McCandless, or his sister, Carine. His parents were worried, but knew that long, improvised jaunts were nothing new for their son.
“He was always an adventuresome, pretty self-contained individual,” Walt McCandless said in an interview. “And it’s important to realize that the trip he didn’t come back from wasn’t his first adventure.”
Some readers see Mr. McCandless’s rejection of materialism and his embrace of the natural world as romantic, taking him for a contemporary Thoreau. Many others, especially native Alaskans, have argued that he must have been mentally ill, suicidal or hubristic, and that it was irresponsible for Mr. Krakauer to glorify his story.
Walt McCandless and Mr. Krakauer both disagreed with that assessment.
In 2014 Mr. McCandless’s sister Carine published “The Wild Truth,” a memoir that depicted a physically abusive, chaotic childhood that both siblings were forced to conceal.
“Chris made his choices, and he accepted accountability,” Ms. McCandless said in an interview. But she said she does feel her parents should accept some blame.
"I do hold them accountable for his disappearance,” she said. “I think for him to leave in that extreme way, to go without telling anyone where he was — I do hold them accountable for his disappearance, but not for his death.”
Walt and Billie McCandless said they did not want to comment on the memoir.
“He was a tortured soul; he did what he had to do,” said Mr. Krakauer, who wrote the foreword to “The Wild Truth,” adding: “He suffered as a young man, and he did what he had to do to escape it.”
By the time Mr. McCandless died, he seemed to have found a measure of peace, according to one of his last notes, scrawled inside a paperback copy of “Education of a Wandering Man,” a memoir by the novelist Louis L’Amour. It said:
“I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS YOU ALL.”
Read the article “Dying in the Wild, a Hiker Recorded the Terror”
Read the review “Taking Risk to Its ‘Logical’ Extreme”
An earlier version of this article, using information from Mr. Krakauer’s publisher, misstated the number of copies of "Into the Wild” that have been sold. It is several million, not “nearly two million.”