Directed by Sean Penn and scheduled for release in early 2007, the movie, “Into the Wild”, promises to be a blockbuster. What’s most surprising to me is that Hollywood has waited over 10 years to film this book by Jon Krakauer.

First written as a long essay for the January 1993 issue of “Outback Magazine”, the article was entitled, “Death of an Innocent, How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds”. Following rave reviews and a “National Magazine Award” nomination, this issue of “Outback Magazine” became sought after by male college students to be shared and discussed in dormitory rooms, lounges, and coffee shops on campuses around the world.

In 1997, Krakauer expanded his magazine article into a short (207 pages) book and republished it under the title “Into the Wild”. The book re-ignited interest in the story and it was on the “New York Times” best seller’s list for over two years.

This true story focuses on Christopher McCandless, who in 1992 had recently graduated from college. An overly idealistic young man, he doesn’t have any direction in life other than to free himself of social constraints. He abandons all his possessions and eventually hitchhikes to Alaska to live with nature in the wilderness.

It’s a familiar story to a point. A young man just finishing college—one of the many societal expectations he has been chaffing under. He feels spiritually alienated from his East Coast bourgeois life, so he sets out by himself to make a new life. In the Southwest, he canoes down the Grand Canyon. He gravitates to the Northwest by working in restaurants and on harvests crews. Determined to live as au natural as possible, he makes his way to Alaska and eventually settles in the hulk of an old city bus at an abandoned hunter’s campsite north of Mt McKinley. He supplements the 10 pounds of rice that he had brought along with small game and berries. In four months he is dead of starvation and the poisoning effect of wild potato seeds.

To explore how this young man tried to reinvent his life, Krakauer uses Chris’ letters to friends. He interviews Chris’ parents and sister and other people who had known him. Krakauer also gains access to Chris’ journals and photographs found by the body.

Chris’ naïve idealism was greatly responsible for the mistakes he made that eventually led to his death. Krakauer, with his years of living in Alaska, and knowing the terrain and the types of people who settle there, confronts the reader with a conundrum faced by many of our youth. Can a person escape into the wilds to avoid the materialistic and politically-controlled future he envisions for himself?

Was Chris’ attempt to find himself in the Alaskan wilds an aberration or was he living out a dream that many have long since forsaken for the comforts of social approval and conventionalism. As Chris writes in a letter to a friend, do we become tamed in exchange for “monotonous security”?

After one hundred days in the wild, with death from starvation looming, Chris records in his journal that he is “too weak to walk out, [I] have literally been trapped in the world.”

The author, Jon Krakauer is also known for his book entitled, “Into Thin Air” which describes the 1996 Mount Everest expedition gone awry and the ensuing disaster that killed two top guides, a sherpa, and several expedition clients.