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Alexander Shoumatoff (born November 4, 1946) is a journalist and author who was Vanity Fair Magazine's senior-most contributing editor from 1986 to 2015, and a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1978 to 1987. He authored 11 books and was a founding contributing editor of Outside Magazine and Condé Nast Traveler. Most of his books are extensions of long-form journalism that has appeared in dozens of American and international magazines and other literary sources and collections. Shoumatoff covered international dictators in South America and Africa, nearly all major political candidates in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s for Vanity Fair, often before they chose to run for office, including John Kerry, Donald Trump, Bill Weld, Robert Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, and many more. In 1976, he spent 6 months in the Amazon Rainforest where he was the first remote visitor to tribes that became his book Rivers Amazon which led to a long career in global journalism. In 1986, he wrote an article about the murder of Dian Fossey that was optioned to become the movie Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff was called "consistently the farthest flung of the far-flung writers at The New Yorker" by The New York Times, "the greatest writer in America" by Donald Trump, and "one of our greatest storytellers" by Graydon Carter. Childhood Shoumatoff grew up in the nearby town of Bedford, New York, an community known for famous people and business leaders. When he was four, his parents put him in a summer camp in Switzerland where he learned to speak French. He went to the local country-day school, Rippowam School, where he later taught middle-school science in his mid-twenties. After he graduated from eighth grade, his family moved to London and began to spend summers in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland. His father, a passionate mountain climber, took Shoumatoff and his older brother Nick up major peaks in the Alps. Shoumatoff's secondary schooling was at St. Paul's School, then an all-boys boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, where he was at the top of his class and the captain of the squash team. His friends included future Presidential candicate John Kerry who he eventually profiled in 1996. When he was 16, impressed with recordings by the recordings of South Carolina bluesman Pink Anderson, he bought a guitar and went to the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, where Bob Dylan got his break. Izzy Young sent him to Harlem to take lessons from the Reverend Gary Davis. Davis would eventually have a huge impact on Shoumatoff and who would become the subject of Shoumatoff's first published magazine piece. Shoumatoff was admitted to Harvard University in 1964, as a sophomore where he studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder. He was on the Harvard Lampoon and his senior-year roommates included Douglas Kenney, founder of National Lampoon whose work included the films Animal House and Caddyshack and was a national-champion squash player. Shoumatoff descends from a family of Russian nobility that he traced back dozens of generations in his 1982 book, Russian Blood. The Shoumatoff family were originally Baltic German Schumacher and had migrated to St. Petersburg and been ennobled under Peter the Great. Shoumatoff's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, was the portrait artist who was painting President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 when he collapsed before her and died, and was a household name during his childhood. Shoumatoff's great uncle, Andrey Avinoff, who served as the father-figure for his father, was a diplomat and "gentleman-in-waiting" to Csar Nicholas II at the time of the Soviet Revolution, served as the translator of Russian for the Treaty of Versailles, was likely the world's top lepidopterist through the 1920s in expeditions as far as to Tibet which were financed by Nicholas II, and was the famous director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh from 1925 to 1945. By his death, Avinoff was consider one of America's most prominent Russian-Americans and was profiled in 1948 by The New Yorker. His paternal grandfather, Leo Shoumatoff, was the business manager of Igor Sikorsky's aircraft company who developed the first passenger airplane, The Pan Am Clipper, and the helicopter. His father, Nicholas Shoumatoff, was an engineer who designed many of the paper mills around the world, and was an entomologist and well-known alpine ecologist who wrote the books Europe's Mountain Center and Around the Roof of the World. Early writing and music career Graduating from college into the turbulence of the hippie culture and the Vietnam War, Shoumatoff first aspired to be a songwriter. After a stint at The Washington Post as a night police reporter, and with a draft classification of I-A, he enlisted into a Marine Corps reserve intelligence unit that trained him to be parachuted behind the Iron Curtain to melt into the local population. He was given Russian Language schooling in Monterey, California. There, however, he fell in with the psychedelic counterculture of the late 1960s. He turned to his New York City guitar teacher, the Reverend Gary Davis and Davis made him a minister in a heated moment in a store-front church in Harlem. This enabled him to get an honorable, IV-D discharge from the Marines, the D standing for Divinity, and allowed him to avoid having to go to Vietnam. In 1969, rather than returning to The Washington Post to become their Moscow correspondent under editor Ben Bradlee, Shoumatoff chose to "drop out" with his girlfriend and they moved to an old farm in New Hampshire. He taught French at a local college, drove a school bus and under heavy cannabis use and was engrossed in nature. Breaking up with his girlfriend that fall, he drifted to northern California, spending time at a succession of communes and playing music around bonfires and writing more songs. There, he sold his profile of Gary Davis to Rolling Stone and got a song-writing contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Doc Watson, and others. He went to New York City to perform his songs but instead ended up writing for magazines, starting with the The Village Voice. He developed a piece on Florida into his first book, Florida Ramble, and married his editor's assistant. The newlyweds lived in the Marsh Sanctuary in Mount Kisco, where he became the resident naturalist. The marriage lasted only two years and Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York, left for the Amazon Rainforest. There, he spent nine months, getting to remote Yanomamo villages that no one from the outside world had seen, and nearly died of falciparum malaria. His book on the experience,The Rivers Amazon, was compared by reviewers with the classic exploration books of the Amazon by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Walter Bates and was exce.... Discover the Christopher Hitchens James Wolcott popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Christopher Hitchens James Wolcott books.