When Jon Krakauer wrote Into the Wild, the carefully reconstructed story of how a recent college graduate journeyed into the wilds of Alaska and did not live to tell the tale, he made it clear that the story of Chris McCandless intrigued him because of how tightly and compellingly hooked up it was to broader currents of American history. Noting that McCandless carried Thoreau, Jack London, and other great figures in the American literature of freedom with him into the bush, Krakauer convincingly showed that McCandless' compulsion to strip his life to the bare essentials by owning nothing, living nowhere, confronting nature, and living off the land was not (or not only) an idiosyncratic quirk of a privileged, well-educated young man, but was also a conscious attempt to live out the romantic philosophy of freedom developed in such works as Walden and Call of the Wild.
Krakauer was able to make such an argument in part because his own history bears some striking resemblances to McCandless.' Though he lived to write about it, he, too, took untenable risks in the Alaskan wild; as a young mountaineer with more guts than wisdom, he more than once risked his life on climbs that he probably should not have undertaken. In the tale of Chris McCandless, Krakauer recovers pieces of his own youthful romance with the special kind of freedom that one experiences when one is alone in the harshest of natural environments; this freedom, he explains in the book, is distinctly American in its philosophical and geographical dimensions, and has as much to do with the comfy New England transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century as it does with the rugged, death-defying quest for new frontiers that animated the American push to the west.
Now Into the Wild is a film. The brainchild of Sean Penn, the movie is a labor of love that, according to Penn, attempts to convey what it means to live a full, free life: "What moved me about the story was I felt this kid had furnished himself with a very full life in a short time,” Penn told the New York Times. “He lived all the chapters, in a way that very few people do.