Alex Shoumatoff
Encyclopedia
Alex Shoumatoff is an American writer known for his literary journalism, nature and environmental writing, and books and magazine pieces about political and environmental situations and world affairs. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker
magazine from 1978 to 1987, a founding contributing editor of Outside magazine
and Condé Nast Traveler
, and is a senior contributing editor to Vanity Fair
, his main outlet since 1986. He is known for reporting on some of the most remote corners of the world.
He has 10 published books and since 2001 has been the editor of a web site, DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com, devoted to "documenting and raising awareness about the planet's rapidly disappearing natural and cultural diversity." Hundreds of pages of his writing are posted on the site http://www.dispatchesfromthevanishingworld.com/. Career highlights include an article he wrote about the mountain gorilla advocate Diane Fossey, which eventually became the film Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff was recently called "the greatest writer in America" by Donald Trump
and was also recently called "one of our greatest story tellers" by Graydon Carter, the editor in chief at Vanity Fair. Shoumatoff may be, arguably, the most widely traveled magazine journalist with the broadest range in subject matter writing in English.
which may be traced back dozens of generations. He relates the family history, particularly of his grandparents' generation (White emigres) in his 1982 book, Russian Blood (see part 1 and part 2 of the original New Yorker magazine excerpts from 1978). His paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shoumatoff
, became a prominent portrait artist who was most notably painting President Franklin Roosevelt when he collapsed before her with a massive cerebral hemorrhage ending his life and famously escorted his mistress, Lucy Rutherford, away from the scene before the media arrived. Her brother, Andrey Avinoff
, a "gentleman-in-waiting" to the Tsar at the time of the February Revolution
, and an artist and renowned lepidopterist
, became the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
in Pittsburgh from 1925 to 1945. His paternal grandfather, Leo Shoumatoff, was the business manager of fellow-Russian-emigre Igor Sikorsky
's aircraft company
, which developed the helicopter
and the first passenger airplane at the time. His other grandfather was a Colonel
in the Empress's cavalry guard. His father, Nicholas Shoumatoff, was an industrial and mechanical engineer who designed paper mills around the world, an entomologist, and alpine ecologist who wrote the books Europe's Mountain Center and Around the Roof of the World.
, an exurban enclave of old-line WASPs
that is now most famously inhabited by famous people and top American business leaders. He went to the local country-day school, Rippowam, where he later, in his mid-twenties, taught middle-school science. Upon his graduation from the eighth grade, the family moved to London and began to summer in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland
. His father, a passionate mountain climber, took Shoumatoff and his older brother Nick up major peaks in the Alps
. When he was four, his parents put him in a summer camp in Gstaad
, Switzerland, where he learned to speak French.
Shoumatoff did his secondary schooling at St. Paul's School
, a then all-boys boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire
, where he was at the top of his class and the captain of the squash team. When he was 16, having been blown away by a record of the South Carolina
blues man Pink Anderson
, he bought a guitar and wandered down to the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village
, New York, where Izzy Young
, who ran the operation, sent him to Harlem
to take lessons from the Reverend Gary Davis
, a forgotten blind black southern country blues guitar player, who was living in a shack behind a row of condemned buildings and playing in the street. Davis would have a huge impact on Shoumatoff and would become the subject of Shoumatoff's first published magazine piece.
He was admitted to Harvard University
. He studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell
in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder
and was on the Harvard Lampoon
. His senior year roommates included Douglas Kenney
, who went on to write the scripts of Animal House and Caddyshack
and to found the National Lampoon.
, he enlisted in an obscure Marine Corps reserve intelligence unit, which trained him to be parachuted behind the Iron Curtain
and to melt into the local population. He was given intensive Russian Language schooling in Monterey, California, and there he fell in with the psychedelic counterculture, which was in full flower on the coast. Now 22 years old, he realized that he had made a huge mistake thinking he could do what the Marines were expecting, including the interrogation techniques they were teaching him. He turned to the Reverend Gary Davis with his moral predicament, 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).
In 1970 Shoumatoff chose to "drop out" with his girlfriend and they lived on an old farm in New Hampshire. Here, he taught French at a local college and drove a school bus, wrote songs at the rate of two or three a day and became deeply interested in birds, then trees and mushrooms, and eventually every form of life following the naturalist tradition that ran strongly his family. Breaking up with the girl that fall, he drifted out to northern California, hanging out on a succession of communes and playing music around bonfires and writing more songs. There, he sold his profile of Gary Davis for $300 to Rolling Stone
, then a broadside printed on newsprint that chronicled the Sixties counterculture, and got a song-writing contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Joan Baez
, Joni Mitchell
, Muddy Waters
, and Doc Watson
. He went to New York City to perform his songs but was not confident in his singing and guitar-playing to play publicly, and ended up instead writing for magazines, starting with the Village Voice. He developed a piece on Florida into his first book, Florida Ramble, and married his editor's assistant. The young newlyweds lived in the Marsh Sanctuary in Mount Kisco, where he was the resident naturalist, and there was an overgrown Greek amphitheater that Isadora Duncan
had danced in, which he restored and put on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream
The marriage lasted only two years, and the heartbroken Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York
took off for the Amazon
which he had been longing to explore since seeing the film "Black Orpheus" and listening to the bossa records of Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz. There he spent nine months in the rainforest, getting to a remote Yanomamo Indian village where that no one from the outside world had set foot in, and nearly dying of falciparum malaria. His book on the experience is a riveting account titled The Rivers Amazon, which was published by Sierra Club
Press, and compared by reviewers with the classic books on the Amazon by Theodore Roosevelt
and Henry Walter Bates
.
Returning to Mount Kisco with a beautiful young Brazilian wife and his perspective permanently altered, he learned that his Westchester book had been taken by the New Yorker and joined its staff in 1978. Shoumatoff established himself as "consistently the farthest-flung of the New Yorker's far-flung correspondents", as the New York Times described him, doing pieces on the pygmies in the Ituri Forest, on the lemurs of Madagascar, tracing the legendary Amazon women up a tributary of the Amazon, the Nhamunda, that no one except the local Indians and mestizos had been up since a Frenchman in 1890.
On these trips, Shoumatoff often took a small traveling guitar. On his frequent trips to Brazil, which he would end up writing four books about, he met the masters of bossa nova at the time, Antônio Carlos Jobim
and Luis Bonfa, and wrote the first piece in English (for the New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town"), about Caetano Veloso
. In Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he jammed with Okay Jazz, Le Grand Maitre Franco's famous Zairian rumba band, and became a close friend with the ethnomusiciologist and bass player Benoit Quersin (who played on Chet Baker
's legendary 1956 recording in Paris). Quersin soon after accompanied him on several of his adventures into remote, unknown corners of the world, including Madagascar and up the Nhamunda River in the Amazon. Shoumatoff was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
to write a book on "cultural ecology" in the tropics (In Southern Light).
, a practice still widely used there to provide detailed accounts of situations and to fill the weekly magazine's pages. Shoumatoff began "recording" everything that he was told, observed, or thought in over 400 red Chinese notebooks, filling some 70,000 pages to date. Shoumatoff says "the New Yorker gave its writers free rein, allowing them to choose what they wanted to write about, at whatever length they felt was needed." To this day Shoumatoff, in his commitment to giving the reader, to the best of his ability, "the full picture, in all its complexity and ambiguity", still writes very long, to the consternation of magazine editors at other magazines.
Most of his books, beginning with Florida Ramble, and continuing to his last published book, Legends of the American Desert, are comprehensive portraits of places (a state, a county, a rainforest, a desert), and often originated with a magazine article. They identify and present, in an easy-to-read mixture of travelogue and exposition, elements that Shoumatoff believes make the place the way it is: flora and fauna; natural, cultural, and political history; local dialects and belief systems. His writing is often characterized by a fascination with "the Other", disenchantment with the modern consumer culture, and an insatiable curiosity. According to the essayist Edward Hoagland
, "admirably protean, encyclopedic, and indefatigable, Shoumatoff has the curiosity of an army of researchers and writes like a house afire." Shoumatoff also appeals to, frequently works with, and his work often crosses with, work in cultural anthropology and other specialists of species, culture, or music.
, which was made into the movie Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff became one of the newly resurrected magazine's stars, writing about everything from a riveting account of the fall of Paraguay's dictator Alfredo Stroessner (see the article on his web site) to trying to pinpoint the source, in central Africa, of the AIDS virus. In 1990, his book The World Is Burning, about the murder of the president of the Amazon Rubber-Tappers' Union Chico Mendes
, was optioned by the actor Robert Redford
though the movie was never made. In the early 1990s, he became obsessed with golf, and to justify all the time he was spending playing, he frequently published pieces in a category he called "investigative golf." (See Annals of Investigative Golf: The Gavea Golf Club in Rio de Janeiro). Two of his more famous golf pieces were one in 1994 which former President Bill Clinton
's golf buddies extensively and specifically discussed his extra-marital affairs, prior to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Esquire Magazine would not print; and another piece about playing with O.J. Simpson's golf buddies that revealed that Simpson may have hidden the murder weapon in his golf bag. He also profiled Uma Thurman and her father, Buddhist Robert Thurman
, for a feature in Vanity Fair. During this era, related to these articles, Shoumatoff also appeared several times on tabloid T.V. shows such as Inside Edition
, then hosted by political commentator Bill O'Reilly
, and E! True Hollywood Story
.
In the mid-late 1990s, realizing that many of the places that he had been writing about since the 1970s had been changed drastically by the West's appetite for goods, he strengthened his focus on the environment and an interest in creating a written record of these places and/or cultures and species. He wrote about global warming and the Kyoto conference (see Dispatch #5) in 1997, and started his Web site four years later. He was also selected as the correspondent from Vanity Fair to profile Al Gore for the 2000 election in a piece that was never published.
In 1997, his book Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest, (Knopf, 1997) was published to high acclaim. It was on the cover of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle
book reviews, was named a New York Times notable book of 1997, Time magazine and New York Posts top ten books of 1997, and Mountain and Plains Booksellers' Association best non-fiction book of 1997. This is Shoumatoff's last published book.
Having back-burned his music career for 37 years, Shoumatoff also recorded his first compact disk, Suitcase on the Loose, produced by his longtime friend Kate McGarrigle
(the mother of Rufus Wainwright
and Martha Wainwright
), and featured on VanityFair.com including his song from the 70's Pennsylvania Turnpike Blues that was featured on NPR's weekend edition of All Things Considered during the Pennsylvania primary for the 2008 primary election.
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine from 1978 to 1987, a founding contributing editor of Outside magazine
Outside (magazine)
Outside is an American magazine focused on the outdoors. The first issue debuted in September 1977 with its mission statement declaring that the publication was "dedicated to covering the people, sports and activities, politics, art, literature, and hardware of the outdoors..."Its founders were...
and Condé Nast Traveler
Condé Nast Traveler
Condé Nast Traveler is a US magazine published by Condé Nast. It has its origins in a mailing sent out by the Diners Club club beginning in 1953, listing locations that would take the card. It began taking advertising in 1955. In order to attract more advertisers, it became a full-fledged magazine,...
, and is a senior contributing editor to Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (magazine)
Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...
, his main outlet since 1986. He is known for reporting on some of the most remote corners of the world.
He has 10 published books and since 2001 has been the editor of a web site, DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com, devoted to "documenting and raising awareness about the planet's rapidly disappearing natural and cultural diversity." Hundreds of pages of his writing are posted on the site http://www.dispatchesfromthevanishingworld.com/. Career highlights include an article he wrote about the mountain gorilla advocate Diane Fossey, which eventually became the film Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff was recently called "the greatest writer in America" by Donald Trump
Donald Trump
Donald John Trump, Sr. is an American business magnate, television personality and author. He is the chairman and president of The Trump Organization and the founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Trump's extravagant lifestyle, outspoken manner and role on the NBC reality show The Apprentice have...
and was also recently called "one of our greatest story tellers" by Graydon Carter, the editor in chief at Vanity Fair. Shoumatoff may be, arguably, the most widely traveled magazine journalist with the broadest range in subject matter writing in English.
Ethnicity and ancestry
Shoumatoff descends from a family of the Russian nobilityRussian nobility
The Russian nobility arose in the 14th century and essentially governed Russia until the October Revolution of 1917.The Russian word for nobility, Dvoryanstvo , derives from the Russian word dvor , meaning the Court of a prince or duke and later, of the tsar. A nobleman is called dvoryanin...
which may be traced back dozens of generations. He relates the family history, particularly of his grandparents' generation (White emigres) in his 1982 book, Russian Blood (see part 1 and part 2 of the original New Yorker magazine excerpts from 1978). His paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shoumatoff
Elizabeth Shoumatoff
Elizabeth Shoumatoff was an American painter who was best known for painting the Unfinished Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt....
, became a prominent portrait artist who was most notably painting President Franklin Roosevelt when he collapsed before her with a massive cerebral hemorrhage ending his life and famously escorted his mistress, Lucy Rutherford, away from the scene before the media arrived. Her brother, Andrey Avinoff
Andrey Avinoff
Andrey Avinoff sometimes referred to as Andrej Nikolajewitsch Avinoff or Andrei Avinoff, was a Russian entomologist and painter who became Director of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.He was especially interested in Lepidoptera among many other interests...
, a "gentleman-in-waiting" to the Tsar at the time of the February Revolution
February Revolution
The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. Centered around the then capital Petrograd in March . Its immediate result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, and the end of the Russian Empire...
, and an artist and renowned lepidopterist
Lepidopterist
A lepidopterist is a person who specialises in the study of Lepidoptera, members of an order encompassing moths and the three superfamilies of butterflies, skipper butterflies, and moth-butterflies...
, became the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Carnegie Museum of Natural History, located at 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, was founded by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896...
in Pittsburgh from 1925 to 1945. His paternal grandfather, Leo Shoumatoff, was the business manager of fellow-Russian-emigre Igor Sikorsky
Igor Sikorsky
Igor Sikorsky , born Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky was a Russian American pioneer of aviation in both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft...
's aircraft company
Sikorsky Aircraft
The Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation is an American aircraft manufacturer based in Stratford, Connecticut. Its parent company is United Technologies Corporation.-History:...
, which developed the helicopter
Helicopter
A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by one or more engine-driven rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forwards, backwards, and laterally...
and the first passenger airplane at the time. His other grandfather was a Colonel
Colonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
in the Empress's cavalry guard. His father, Nicholas Shoumatoff, was an industrial and mechanical engineer who designed paper mills around the world, an entomologist, and alpine ecologist who wrote the books Europe's Mountain Center and Around the Roof of the World.
Childhood and education
Shoumatoff grew up in the 1950s in Bedford, New YorkBedford (town), New York
Bedford is a town in Westchester County, New York, USA. The population was 17,335 at the 2010 census.The Town of Bedford is located in the northeastern part of Westchester County, and contains the three hamlets of Bedford Hills, Bedford Village, and Katonah...
, an exurban enclave of old-line WASPs
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP is an informal term, often derogatory or disparaging, for a closed group of high-status Americans mostly of British Protestant ancestry. The group supposedly wields disproportionate financial and social power. When it appears in writing, it is usually used to...
that is now most famously inhabited by famous people and top American business leaders. He went to the local country-day school, Rippowam, where he later, in his mid-twenties, taught middle-school science. Upon his graduation from the eighth grade, the family moved to London and began to summer in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland
Bernese Oberland
The Bernese Oberland is the higher part of the canton of Bern, Switzerland, in the southern end of the canton: The area around Lake Thun and Lake Brienz, and the valleys of the Bernese Alps .The flag of the Bernese Oberland consists of a black eagle in a gold field The Bernese Oberland (Bernese...
. His father, a passionate mountain climber, took Shoumatoff and his older brother Nick up major peaks in the Alps
Alps
The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....
. When he was four, his parents put him in a summer camp in Gstaad
Gstaad
Gstaad is a village in the German-speaking section of the Canton of Berne in southwestern Switzerland. Part of the municipality of Saanen, Gstaad is known as one of the most exclusive ski resorts in the world....
, Switzerland, where he learned to speak French.
Shoumatoff did his secondary schooling at St. Paul's School
St. Paul's School (Concord, New Hampshire)
St. Paul's School is a highly selective college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The school is one of only six remaining 100% residential boarding schools in the U.S. The New Hampshire campus currently serves 533 students,...
, a then all-boys boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire
Concord, New Hampshire
The city of Concord is the capital of the state of New Hampshire in the United States. It is also the county seat of Merrimack County. As of the 2010 census, its population was 42,695....
, where he was at the top of his class and the captain of the squash team. When he was 16, having been blown away by a record of the South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
blues man Pink Anderson
Pink Anderson
"Pink" Anderson was a blues singer and guitarist, born in Laurens, South Carolina.-Life and career:After being raised in Greenville and Spartanburg, South Carolina, he joined Dr...
, he bought a guitar and wandered down to the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
, New York, where Izzy Young
Izzy Young
Israel Goodman Young or Izzy Young is a noted figure in the world of folk music, both in America and Sweden.He is the former owner of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, and since 1973, he has owned and operated the Folklore Centrum store in Stockholm.- Biography :In 1957, on...
, who ran the operation, sent him to Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
to take lessons from the Reverend Gary Davis
Reverend Gary Davis
Reverend Gary Davis, also Blind Gary Davis, was an American blues and gospel singer and guitarist, who was also proficient on the banjo and harmonica...
, a forgotten blind black southern country blues guitar player, who was living in a shack behind a row of condemned buildings and playing in the street. Davis would have a huge impact on Shoumatoff and would become the subject of Shoumatoff's first published magazine piece.
He was admitted to Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. He studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder
John Tracy Kidder is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer of the 1981 nonfiction narrative, The Soul of a New Machine, about the creation of a new computer at Data General Corporation...
and was on the Harvard Lampoon
Harvard Lampoon
The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor publication founded in 1876 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.-Overview:Published since 1876, The Harvard Lampoon is the world's longest continually published humor magazine. It is also the second longest-running English-language humor...
. His senior year roommates included Douglas Kenney
Douglas Kenney
Douglas C. Kenney was an American writer and actor who co-founded National Lampoon magazine in 1970. Kenney edited the magazine and wrote much of its early material.-Childhood:...
, who went on to write the scripts of Animal House and Caddyshack
Caddyshack
Caddyshack is a 1980 American comedy film directed by Harold Ramis and written by Brian Doyle-Murray, Ramis, and Douglas Kenney. It stars Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Michael O'Keefe, Cindy Morgan, and Bill Murray...
and to found the National Lampoon.
Early writing and music career
Graduating at 1968 into the turbulence of the late 1960s, after hearing the young Dylan's "Another Side of Bob Dylan", Shoumatoff aspired to be a songwriter. After a brief stint on the Washington Post as a night police reporter, with a draft classification of I-A and having no desire to go to the Vietnam WarVietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, he enlisted in an obscure Marine Corps reserve intelligence unit, which trained him to be parachuted behind the Iron Curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
and to melt into the local population. He was given intensive Russian Language schooling in Monterey, California, and there he fell in with the psychedelic counterculture, which was in full flower on the coast. Now 22 years old, he realized that he had made a huge mistake thinking he could do what the Marines were expecting, including the interrogation techniques they were teaching him. He turned to the Reverend Gary Davis with his moral predicament, 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).
In 1970 Shoumatoff chose to "drop out" with his girlfriend and they lived on an old farm in New Hampshire. Here, he taught French at a local college and drove a school bus, wrote songs at the rate of two or three a day and became deeply interested in birds, then trees and mushrooms, and eventually every form of life following the naturalist tradition that ran strongly his family. Breaking up with the girl that fall, he drifted out to northern California, hanging out on a succession of communes and playing music around bonfires and writing more songs. There, he sold his profile of Gary Davis for $300 to Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
, then a broadside printed on newsprint that chronicled the Sixties counterculture, and got a song-writing contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Joan Baez
Joan Baez
Joan Chandos Baez is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice....
, Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...
, Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield , known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician, generally considered the "father of modern Chicago blues"...
, and Doc Watson
Doc Watson
Arthel Lane "Doc" Watson is an American guitar player, songwriter and singer of bluegrass, folk, country, blues and gospel music. He has won seven Grammy awards as well as a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Watson's flatpicking skills and knowledge of traditional American music are highly regarded...
. He went to New York City to perform his songs but was not confident in his singing and guitar-playing to play publicly, and ended up instead writing for magazines, starting with the Village Voice. He developed a piece on Florida into his first book, Florida Ramble, and married his editor's assistant. The young newlyweds lived in the Marsh Sanctuary in Mount Kisco, where he was the resident naturalist, and there was an overgrown Greek amphitheater that Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan was a dancer, considered by many to be the creator of modern dance. Born in the United States, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. In the United States she was popular only in New York, and only later in her life...
had danced in, which he restored and put on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta...
The marriage lasted only two years, and the heartbroken Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York
Westchester County, New York
Westchester County is a county located in the U.S. state of New York. Westchester covers an area of and has a population of 949,113 according to the 2010 Census, residing in 45 municipalities...
took off for the Amazon
Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon Rainforest , also known in English as Amazonia or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers most of the Amazon Basin of South America...
which he had been longing to explore since seeing the film "Black Orpheus" and listening to the bossa records of Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz. There he spent nine months in the rainforest, getting to a remote Yanomamo Indian village where that no one from the outside world had set foot in, and nearly dying of falciparum malaria. His book on the experience is a riveting account titled The Rivers Amazon, which was published by Sierra Club
Sierra Club
The Sierra Club is the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. It was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by the conservationist and preservationist John Muir, who became its first president...
Press, and compared by reviewers with the classic books on the Amazon by Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...
and Henry Walter Bates
Henry Walter Bates
Henry Walter Bates FRS FLS FGS was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. He was most famous for his expedition to the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection in a shipwreck...
.
Returning to Mount Kisco with a beautiful young Brazilian wife and his perspective permanently altered, he learned that his Westchester book had been taken by the New Yorker and joined its staff in 1978. Shoumatoff established himself as "consistently the farthest-flung of the New Yorker's far-flung correspondents", as the New York Times described him, doing pieces on the pygmies in the Ituri Forest, on the lemurs of Madagascar, tracing the legendary Amazon women up a tributary of the Amazon, the Nhamunda, that no one except the local Indians and mestizos had been up since a Frenchman in 1890.
On these trips, Shoumatoff often took a small traveling guitar. On his frequent trips to Brazil, which he would end up writing four books about, he met the masters of bossa nova at the time, Antônio Carlos Jobim
Antônio Carlos Jobim
Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim , also known as Tom Jobim , was a Brazilian songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, and pianist/guitarist. He was a primary force behind the creation of the bossa nova style, and his songs have been performed by many singers and instrumentalists within...
and Luis Bonfa, and wrote the first piece in English (for the New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town"), about Caetano Veloso
Caetano Veloso
Caetano Emanuel Viana Teles Veloso , better known as Caetano Veloso, is a Brazilian composer, singer, guitarist, writer, and political activist. Veloso first became known for his participation in the Brazilian musical movement Tropicalismo which encompassed theatre, poetry and music in the 1960s,...
. In Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he jammed with Okay Jazz, Le Grand Maitre Franco's famous Zairian rumba band, and became a close friend with the ethnomusiciologist and bass player Benoit Quersin (who played on Chet Baker
Chet Baker
Chesney Henry "Chet" Baker, Jr. was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist and singer.Though his music earned him a large following , Baker's popularity was due in part to his "matinee idol-beauty" and "well-publicized drug habit."He died in 1988 in Amsterdam, the...
's legendary 1956 recording in Paris). Quersin soon after accompanied him on several of his adventures into remote, unknown corners of the world, including Madagascar and up the Nhamunda River in the Amazon. Shoumatoff was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
to write a book on "cultural ecology" in the tropics (In Southern Light).
Writing and journalistic techniques
Shoumatoff is known for his style of "long fact writing" which was a style developed at the New Yorker, which was edited by William ShawnWilliam Shawn
William Shawn was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.-Education and Early Life:...
, a practice still widely used there to provide detailed accounts of situations and to fill the weekly magazine's pages. Shoumatoff began "recording" everything that he was told, observed, or thought in over 400 red Chinese notebooks, filling some 70,000 pages to date. Shoumatoff says "the New Yorker gave its writers free rein, allowing them to choose what they wanted to write about, at whatever length they felt was needed." To this day Shoumatoff, in his commitment to giving the reader, to the best of his ability, "the full picture, in all its complexity and ambiguity", still writes very long, to the consternation of magazine editors at other magazines.
Most of his books, beginning with Florida Ramble, and continuing to his last published book, Legends of the American Desert, are comprehensive portraits of places (a state, a county, a rainforest, a desert), and often originated with a magazine article. They identify and present, in an easy-to-read mixture of travelogue and exposition, elements that Shoumatoff believes make the place the way it is: flora and fauna; natural, cultural, and political history; local dialects and belief systems. His writing is often characterized by a fascination with "the Other", disenchantment with the modern consumer culture, and an insatiable curiosity. According to the essayist Edward Hoagland
Edward Hoagland
Edward Hoagland is an author best known for his nature and travel writing.-Life:...
, "admirably protean, encyclopedic, and indefatigable, Shoumatoff has the curiosity of an army of researchers and writes like a house afire." Shoumatoff also appeals to, frequently works with, and his work often crosses with, work in cultural anthropology and other specialists of species, culture, or music.
Mid to later life and career
In 1986 Shoumatoff wrote his first piece for Vanity Fair, about the murder of Dian FosseyDian Fossey
Dian Fossey was an American zoologist who undertook an extensive study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by famous anthropologist Louis Leakey...
, which was made into the movie Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff became one of the newly resurrected magazine's stars, writing about everything from a riveting account of the fall of Paraguay's dictator Alfredo Stroessner (see the article on his web site) to trying to pinpoint the source, in central Africa, of the AIDS virus. In 1990, his book The World Is Burning, about the murder of the president of the Amazon Rubber-Tappers' Union Chico Mendes
Chico Mendes
Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes , was a Brazilian rubber tapper, trade union leader and environmentalist. He fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest, and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and indigenous peoples...
, was optioned by the actor Robert Redford
Robert Redford
Charles Robert Redford, Jr. , better known as Robert Redford, is an American actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. He has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People, and one for Lifetime...
though the movie was never made. In the early 1990s, he became obsessed with golf, and to justify all the time he was spending playing, he frequently published pieces in a category he called "investigative golf." (See Annals of Investigative Golf: The Gavea Golf Club in Rio de Janeiro). Two of his more famous golf pieces were one in 1994 which former President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
's golf buddies extensively and specifically discussed his extra-marital affairs, prior to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Esquire Magazine would not print; and another piece about playing with O.J. Simpson's golf buddies that revealed that Simpson may have hidden the murder weapon in his golf bag. He also profiled Uma Thurman and her father, Buddhist Robert Thurman
Robert Thurman
Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman is an influential and prolific American Buddhist writer and academic who has authored, edited or translated several books on Tibetan Buddhism. He is the Je Tsongkhapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, holding the first endowed chair...
, for a feature in Vanity Fair. During this era, related to these articles, Shoumatoff also appeared several times on tabloid T.V. shows such as Inside Edition
Inside Edition
Inside Edition is a thirty-minute American television syndicated news program, first aired on CBS on October 9, 1988. It was originally similar to the programs Hard Copy and A Current Affair, but now more closely resembles a condensed version of breakfast television, exclusively with pre-recorded...
, then hosted by political commentator Bill O'Reilly
Bill O'Reilly (commentator)
William James "Bill" O'Reilly, Jr. is an American television host, author, syndicated columnist and political commentator. He is the host of the political commentary program The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, which is the most watched cable news television program on American television...
, and E! True Hollywood Story
E! True Hollywood Story
E! True Hollywood Story is an American documentary series on E! that deals with famous Hollywood celebrities, movies, TV shows and well-known public figures...
.
In the mid-late 1990s, realizing that many of the places that he had been writing about since the 1970s had been changed drastically by the West's appetite for goods, he strengthened his focus on the environment and an interest in creating a written record of these places and/or cultures and species. He wrote about global warming and the Kyoto conference (see Dispatch #5) in 1997, and started his Web site four years later. He was also selected as the correspondent from Vanity Fair to profile Al Gore for the 2000 election in a piece that was never published.
In 1997, his book Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest, (Knopf, 1997) was published to high acclaim. It was on the cover of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
book reviews, was named a New York Times notable book of 1997, Time magazine and New York Posts top ten books of 1997, and Mountain and Plains Booksellers' Association best non-fiction book of 1997. This is Shoumatoff's last published book.
Having back-burned his music career for 37 years, Shoumatoff also recorded his first compact disk, Suitcase on the Loose, produced by his longtime friend Kate McGarrigle
Kate McGarrigle
Kate McGarrigle, CM was a Canadian folk music singer-songwriter, who wrote and performed as a duo with her sister Anna McGarrigle....
(the mother of Rufus Wainwright
Rufus Wainwright
Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter. He has recorded six albums of original music, EPs, and tracks on compilations and film soundtracks.-Early years:...
and Martha Wainwright
Martha Wainwright
Martha Wainwright is a Canadian-American folk-rock singer-songwriter. She is the daughter of American folk singer and actor Loudon Wainwright III and Canadian folk singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle...
), and featured on VanityFair.com including his song from the 70's Pennsylvania Turnpike Blues that was featured on NPR's weekend edition of All Things Considered during the Pennsylvania primary for the 2008 primary election.
See also
- Pedigree CollapsePedigree collapseIn genealogy, pedigree collapse describes how reproduction between two individuals who knowingly or unknowingly share an ancestor causes the number of distinct ancestors in the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it could otherwise be. Robert C...
- Elizabeth ShoumatoffElizabeth ShoumatoffElizabeth Shoumatoff was an American painter who was best known for painting the Unfinished Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt....
- Andrey AvinoffAndrey AvinoffAndrey Avinoff sometimes referred to as Andrej Nikolajewitsch Avinoff or Andrei Avinoff, was a Russian entomologist and painter who became Director of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.He was especially interested in Lepidoptera among many other interests...
Books
- Florida Ramble (1974)
- The Rivers Amazon (1978)
- The Capital of Hope (1978)
- Westchester, Portrait of a County (1979)
- Russian Blood (1982)
- The Mountain of Names (1985, 1995)
- In Southern Light: Trekking through Zaire and the Amazon (1986)
- African Madness (1988)
- The World is Burning (1990)
- Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest (1997)
External links
- A Writer Looks At His Career by Alex Shoumatoff, about his early life and changes in American and world society he has lived through, posted on his web site.
- DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.Com, Alex Shoumatoff's Web Site
- Alex Shoumatoff biography at VanityFair.Com
- Alex Shoumatoff on Amazon.Com
- Alex Shoumatoff at the New Yorker