Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne graduated from respectable colleges and began leading stables lives, working steady jobs in areas they enjoyed. Then, one day, after saying to themselves ‘We have to stop thinking about what other people...

The philosophy of transcendentalism has played a major role in shaping American literature for the last 150 years. At its core, transcendentalism is a set of principles designed to guide a person to happiness through their relationships with God,...

You can hear the waves crash against the shore less than fifty feet from you. Your prized car, the one that you’ve loved for years now, is stuck in the sand, unable to move. All of the money you didn't donate to charity, preventing malnutrition in...

"Each day mankind and the claims of mankind slipped farther from him. Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire, and to plunge...

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer is an interpretation of one devoted man's unwavering hunger for meaning in the world. In 1990, 24-year-old Emory graduate Christopher McCandless leaves society to venture into the wilderness with a goal of reaching...

Within the contents of a variety of different biographies, there are multiple similarities between the conventions that are typically used. However, there are also multiple differences between them in their features that set these works apart from...

Even from the humble beginnings of modern Western society, the wilderness has gripped the collective imagination of Americans. Through Manifest Destiny and, more recently, expansion into the American Northwest, modern minds have been captured by...

The transparent eyeball is a philosophical metaphor introduced by Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The transparent eyeball represents an eye that serves only to be observant rather than reflective. Therefore it teaches us to take in all...

Journalists, and authors of investigative literature, often struggle to keep their writing 100 percent truthful when researching cases with few leads and vague details. Writers tend to teetertotter on the edge of the truth in order to leave...

Timothy Treadwell, best known as the subject for Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, shunned society and left it behind, subsequently falling victim to his own convictions out in the wilderness. Treadwell, an American bear enthusiast, was mauled after 13...

In Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 Mt. Everest Disaster called “Into Thin Air”, Krakauer expresses his disbelief for the fatal accident through various shifts in tone from somber to solemn, or even a journalistic tone. Krakauer places...

Literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes once said, “Literature is the question minus the answer.” In Jon Krakauer's novel Into Thin Air, the author questions if he is loyal enough to his teammates to take the chance of forfeiting his summit...