User:Ryleesmckinney/David Quammen

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David Quammen (born February 24, 1948) is an American science, nature, and travel writer, that is responsible for fifteen novels. Quammen's articles have appeared in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals. In 2013, Quammen's book Spillover was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

A collection of David Quammen's drafts, research, and correspondence is housed in Texas Tech University’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection consists of approximately 63 boxes of literary production, artifacts, maps, and other papers dated between 1856-2014.

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Early life and education

David Quammen was born on February 24, 1948 to W.A. and Mary Quammen. He was raised in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio and graduated from St. Xavier High School in 1966. Following this, he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship, aiding him in attending and graduating from Yale. During his graduate studies at Oxford, he studied literature, concentrating on the works of William Faulkner. After the completion of his education and the publication of his first novel, he relocated to Montana, where he currently lives with his wife.

Career

In the early 1970s, Quammen moved to Montana for the trout fishing. In 1983, he finished The Soul of Viktor Tronko, a spy novel based on Russian historical events. A year later, Blood Line: Stories of Fathers and Sons was published. Following the failure of his spy novel, Quammen began transitioning into a nonfiction writer.

n 1981, Quammen began writing columns for Outside Magazine, and continued for fifteen years. Some of the columns from Outside Magazine and others contributed to Quammen's nonfiction books: Natural Acts(1985), The Flight of the Iguana(1988), Wild Thoughts from Wild Places(1998), and The Boilerplate Rhino(2000).

Later in 1999, Quammen began to write a series of three stories following J. Michael Fay's 2000-mile hike through Central Africa for National Geographic. During this time, Quammen walked with Fay for eight weeks along African river basins. Quammen continued working with National Geographic, holding a Contributing Writer position, producing cover stories like "Was Darwin Wrong?" and "The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion."

From 2007 to 2009, Quammen was employed as the Wallace Stegner Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.Quammen received honorary doctorates from Montana State University and Colorado College. For his work, Quammen was awarded with a Rhodes Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction.

His novel Spillover received two awards: the Science and Society Book Award, given by the National Association of Science Writers, and the Society of Biology (UK) Book Award in General Biology. The Song of the Dodo (Scribner, 1996), a study of the bird's extinction won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing.

Bibliography

Non-fiction

 * Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature; 1984 (Avon Books reprint 1996. ISBN 0-380-71738-7)
 * Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature (Revised and Expanded, with a New Introduction); W. W. Norton, 2009. ISBN 978-0-393-33360-2
 * The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature; Scribner, 1988. ISBN 0-684-83626-2
 * The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions; Scribner, 1996 (reprinted 1997). ISBN 0-684-82712-3
 * Wild Thoughts From Wild Places; Scribner, 1999. ISBN 0-684-85208-X
 * The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder; Scribner, 2001. ISBN 0-7432-0032-2
 * Monster of God : the man-eating predator in the jungles of history and the mind (2003), New York: W. W. Norton ISBN 0393051404
 * The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Great Discoveries); W. W. Norton, 2006. ISBN 978-0-393-32995-7
 * Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic; W. W. Norton, 2012. ISBN 978-0-393-06680-7
 * Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus; W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. ISBN 0393351556
 * The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest; W. W. Norton, 2015. ISBN 978-0-393-35084-5
 * The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life; Simon & Schuster, 2018. ISBN 9781476776644
 * "The Sobbing Pangolin: How a threatened animal may be linked to the [Covid-19] pandemic's beginnings", The New Yorker, 31 August 2020, pp. 26–31. "More field research is needed [...]. More sampling of wild animals. More scrutiny of genomes. More cognizance of the fact that animal infections can become human infections, because humans are animals. We live in a world of viruses, and we have scarcely begun to understand this one [ COVID-19 ]. (p. 31.)

Fiction

 * To Walk the Line, 1970.
 * Walking Out, 1980, made into a movie of the same name in 2017.
 * The Zolta Configuration, 1983.
 * The Soul of Viktor Tronko, 1987.
 * Blood Line: Stories of Fathers and Sons, 1988.