by Jon Krakauer
1996 · 207 pages · Summary updated 24 October 2026
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer tells the true story of Chris McCandless, a young college graduate who gave away his savings, walked into the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 and died there. For readers who want the facts, the debate and the ideas behind it.
In September 1992, moose hunters found the body of Chris McCandless, twenty-four, in an abandoned bus near Denali National Park in Alaska. Two years earlier, he had graduated from Emory University, given his $24,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and drifted across the American West under the name Alexander Supertramp. In April 1992 he walked alone into the Alaskan bush with a rifle and a bag of rice. He lived there for about 16 weeks before he starved. Krakauer retraces his route, interviews the people he met, and compares him to other young men drawn to the wild, including Krakauer himself. His argument is that McCandless was not crazy or suicidal, but a serious, idealistic young man whose risk was a real search for meaning.
Many people dismissed McCandless as mentally ill or suicidal. Krakauer argues against both. Chris read Tolstoy and Thoreau and tried to live by their ideas: own little, depend on yourself, reject comfort. Krakauer's reasoning is that the young often take moral ideas more literally than adults. The example is Chris's gift of $24,000 to Oxfam, an act that looks mad only if you do not share his belief that money corrupts.
Chris's flight was not only philosophical. He learned in his teens that his father had kept up a relationship with his first wife and fathered a child with her after Chris was born. Krakauer argues that this discovery turned admiration into anger. The example is that Chris cut off his parents completely after college, while staying in touch with his sister and with strangers like Wayne Westerberg.
Chris did not die from one big error. He had no detailed map, so he did not know about a cable crossing near the river. He lost much of a moose to flies. He may have eaten seeds that weakened him. Krakauer shows how each choice narrowed his options. The example is July, when the river he crossed easily in April had become a torrent, and he turned back with no way out he knew of.
Near the end, Chris wrote in the margin of Doctor Zhivago that happiness is only real when shared. Krakauer treats this as the most moving sign in the record: the young man who left everyone behind may have changed his mind. The example is his attempt to walk out in July, which suggests he meant to return to people, not to die alone in the wild.
Krakauer tells his own solo climb of the Devils Thumb in 1977. He made the same kind of choices as Chris: alone, young, angry at a demanding father, underprepared in places. He nearly died more than once and survived. His argument is that the line between a story of courage and a story of folly is often chance. The example is how close his own climb came to being a news story about a dead hiker.
Chris rejected his own family but made deep bonds on the road. Wayne Westerberg gave him work and friendship. Jan Burres treated him as a son. Ronald Franz asked to adopt him. Krakauer shows that his warmth was real, but that he always left. The example is Franz, who was devastated by Chris's death, a reminder that the people a wanderer meets carry the cost of his choices too.
“HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED”
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer was published in 1996. It grew out of a long article Krakauer wrote for Outside magazine in January 1993, after the death of a young man in Alaska became national news. The article drew more mail than anything the magazine had published. Krakauer spent more than a year following the young man's trail, and the book became a bestseller and, in 2007, a film directed by Sean Penn.
The book opens at the end. In April 1992, an electrician named Jim Gallien picks up a hitchhiker outside Fairbanks. The young man says his name is Alex. He wants a ride to the Stampede Trail, an old mining track that runs west into the bush north of Denali National Park. He carries a small rifle, a ten-pound bag of rice, and a few books. Gallien worries. He tries to talk Alex out of it, and gives him his own rubber boots. Alex hands Gallien his watch and the change in his pocket, and walks into the snow.
In September, moose hunters find a rusted city bus on the trail, about twenty miles in. A note on the door asks for help. Inside is a sleeping bag with the decomposed body of the young man. He weighs about 67 pounds. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless.
Chris was born in 1968 and grew up in Annandale, Virginia, a prosperous suburb of Washington, D.C. His father, Walt, was a gifted antenna engineer who had worked for NASA. His mother, Billie, ran a consulting business with him. Chris had a younger sister, Carine, to whom he was very close.
He was bright, stubborn and athletic. He ran cross-country in high school and pushed his teammates to train as if their lives depended on it. He read Tolstoy, Thoreau and Jack London, and he took their moral arguments seriously. He was generous with strangers and hard on the people closest to him. He criticized his parents' wealth and their comfortable life.
Krakauer reports a key source of Chris's anger. In his late teens, Chris learned that his father had kept up a relationship with his first wife after Chris was born, and had fathered another child with her. Chris saw his parents' marriage, and the respectable life they built on it, as a lie. He told no one but his sister how much it hurt.
Chris graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990 with strong grades in history and anthropology. His parents offered to buy him a new car. He refused. Then, without telling his family, he gave his remaining savings of about $24,000 to Oxfam, a charity that fights hunger. He loaded his old yellow Datsun and drove west. He did not tell his family where he was going, and they never heard from him again.
In the Lake Mead area of Arizona, a flash flood soaks Chris's car and engine. He abandons the car, burns the cash in his wallet, and continues on foot. He takes a new name, Alexander Supertramp.
For the next two years, he travels by thumb, freight train and canoe. Krakauer traces his route through the people he met:
Krakauer uses these encounters to show a young man who drew people in and then moved on. Each person describes him as polite, funny, honest and stubborn. Several tried to help him with money or gear, and most of the time he refused.
Chris always planned to end his journey in Alaska, his great Alaskan odyssey. In April 1992, he reaches Fairbanks and buys a guide to edible plants. Gallien drops him at the Stampede Trail. In late April the Teklanika River is low and icy, and Chris crosses it easily.
About twenty miles in, he finds an old Fairbanks city bus, number 142, left by a road crew decades earlier and used by hunters as a shelter. He makes it his camp. He hunts squirrels, ducks, porcupines and grouse, and he gathers berries and roots. He keeps a short diary on the blank pages of his plant guide. He shoots a moose, but cannot dry the meat fast enough, and flies lay eggs in it. He calls it one of the greatest tragedies of his life.
He reads Tolstoy, Thoreau and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. In the margins he notes his thoughts. Next to a passage in Zhivago he writes that happiness is only real when shared.
In early July, after about two months, he decides to walk out. He packs up and returns to the Teklanika. It is now a torrent of glacial snowmelt, far too deep and fast to cross. He does not have a detailed map. If he had, he would have seen a hand-operated cable crossing a short distance downstream, and a ranger cabin a few miles away. He turns back to the bus.
His diary entries grow short. He writes about weakness and about being trapped. In mid-August he posts a note on the bus door asking for help. He takes a photo of himself, holding a final note in which he says he has had a happy life, says goodbye, and blesses everyone. He dies around August 18, 1992, after about 113 days in the bush.
The obvious answer is starvation. Krakauer believed, and still argues, that something made it worse. Chris's diary mentions seeds of the wild potato plant, Hedysarum alpinum. In the first edition, Krakauer suggested the seeds contained a toxin that kept his body from using food. Labs found no such toxin, and critics said Krakauer was trying to excuse a simple mistake. In 2013, Krakauer wrote in The New Yorker that a neurotoxin in the seeds may cause paralysis in a starving person. Later research proposed another compound. Scientists still disagree, and many think he simply starved.
Krakauer puts himself in the book. At twenty-three, in 1977, he set out alone to climb the Devils Thumb, a granite peak on the Stikine Icecap in Alaska. He had a strained relationship with his own demanding father and something to prove. He nearly died twice, failed, tried again and reached the summit. He writes that he survived largely by luck.
He argues that Chris was driven by the same restlessness that drove him, and that the difference between them was not sanity but chance.
Krakauer also tells the stories of other young men who went into the wild and did not return. Everett Ruess, a twenty-year-old artist, disappeared in the Utah canyons in 1934. Gene Rosellini tried to live like a Stone Age man in Alaska for years. Carl McCunn flew into the Alaskan bush to photograph wildlife in 1981, forgot to arrange a pickup, and died. Krakauer places Chris among them while arguing that he was more competent than people assumed.
Many Alaskans view Chris as arrogant and unprepared, a young man who walked into the bush without a map or enough food and died of his own mistakes. They resent the way the book romanticizes him. Others criticize Krakauer for projecting his own story onto Chris and for pushing the poison theory to protect his subject's reputation. The bus became a pilgrimage site. Several hikers had to be rescued, and two women drowned crossing the Teklanika, in 2010 and 2019. In June 2020, the Alaska Army National Guard removed the bus by helicopter. It is now held by the University of Alaska Museum of the North.
Read it if you want a gripping piece of reporting about risk, idealism and the pull of wilderness, or if you are deciding what you think of Chris McCandless. It suits anyone who has wanted to walk away from ordinary life, and anyone who has watched someone they love do it.
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Question 1 of 5
What did Chris McCandless do with his savings after college?
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