Jon Krakauer

peer reviewed / Jon Krakauer (“Krakauer” being a synonym for Cracovian [Foster 151]) was born in 1954 in Brookline, Massachusetts (Marquis Who’s Who). His father, Lewis, was born in Brooklyn in 1927, but he studied medicine in Brookline and then moved to Corvallis, Oregon, with his wife Carol Ann to work and raise his son (150-51). Lewis Krakauer passed on his interest in mountaineering, his “love of the outdoors”, and his “gift for writing” (Lewis was the occasional editor of The Year Book of Sports Medicine) to Jon, even though he had not a perfectly stable relationship with him (151-52). Jon’s father was an atheist Jewish person, and his mother was a Unitarian Scandinavian woman, so Jon had “no religion to speak of” as a child and claimed that he was “envious of his Mormon friends’ conviction” (Speaker Jon Krakauer).