Preface to Jack London Special Section

Abstract

Christopher McCandless died alone in the Alaskan bush in 1992 at the age of twenty-four. He was a high-achieving student and recent graduate of Emory University who came from a prosperous upper-middle-class family, and his Hiker-Starves-in-the-Wilds-of-Alaska story made ready copy for news outlets across the country. Shortly thereafter an article on McCandless by Jon Krakauer appeared in Outside magazine. The volume of reader response to the article was immense. Many readers condemned him as foolhardy, selfish, or deluded. Other readers praised him as a hero, an adventurer, or a renegade. Kraukauer wrote a book-length account of the McCandless saga, published in 1996 as Into the Wild. It spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list. What, after all, could make better reading for huffily maturing Generation Xers who found themselves, for better or worse, increasingly entangled in the expanding corporate economies of the late 1990s? Didn’t they, too, think seriously about doing the same thing when they were twentytwo? But McCandless did it. Forget the vagaries of postmodernism. This was a flesh and blood journey straight into the heart of adventure. Once inside Krakauer’s narrative one soon discovers that McCandless was a serious reader, and the influences of London, Twain, Melville, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Jeffers, and others played significant roles in shaping his beliefs. Although by birthright he was more of a Tom Sawyer, pirate books and all, McCandless daringly pulled off a Huck Finn and lit out for the territory. Declassing himself, he abandoned the comforts, camaraderie, and materiality of the yuppie meritocracy and commited to what was, for the most part, a re-primitivized, unmediated existence. His quest, no doubt, had levels of intensity that the rest of us “on the grid” are never likely to replicate.