The Influences

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Authors and ideas - motivations then and now ...

Here is a list of the 9 or 10 books that Christopher McCandless took with him "into the wild" -

• Terminal Man by Michael Crichton
• Taras Bulba by Nikolai V. Gogol
• Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L'Amour
• Doctor Zhivago by Boris L. Pasternak
• something by Robert M. Pirsig?
• Walden, or Life in the Woods and Ktaadn by Thoreau - "live deliberately"
• Death of Ivan Illyich and Family Happiness by Leo G. Tolstoy
• Tanaina Plantlore by Priscilla Russell Kari

Other influences and comparisons -

• Charles Dickens - various works
• Books by Jack London, such as Call of the Wild
• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Helen Waddell's book called Desert Fathers
• H.G. Wells - various works

Some of the sources quoted -

• American West as Living Space by Wallace Stegner
• Dead Father by Donald Barthelme
• Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
• Hungry Summer by John M. Campbell
• In Search of the Miraculous by Theodore Roszak
• Ktaadn by Thoreau
• Letter From a Man by John M. Edwards
• Man in the Landscape by Paul Shepard
• Mountains of California by John Muir
• Pedestrious Tour, of Four Thousand Miles, Through the Western States ... by Estwick Evans
• Scrambles Amongst the Alps by Edward Whymper
• Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr
• The Stars, The Snow, The Fire by John Haines
• Up the Black to Chalkyitsik by Edward Hoagland
• White Fang by Jack London
• Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash