Alex Shoumatoff
Alexander "Alex" Shoumatoff (born November 4, 1946) 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 currently the senior-most contributing editor to Vanity Fair where he has been since 1986. He is known for reporting on some of the most remote corners of the world and may be, arguably, the most widely traveled magazine journalist with the broadest range in subject matter writing in English. Career highlights include an article for Vanity Fair magazine about the mountain gorilla advocate Dian Fossey in 1986 in Rwanda which became the film Gorillas in the Mist; one of the first international articles about the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso in 1984 for The New Yorker; tracing the origin of Aids for Vanity Fair which became the book African Madness; an early 2007 profile of the organization Product Red led by U2 front man Bono; and his arrest in 2008 for trespassing at the Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, California in 2008 that was featured in The New York Post and Vanity Fair about how members of the Grove were attempting to log old-growth redwood trees, but became much more than that after news of his arrest was picked up by news outlets. He has 10 published books and since 2001 has been the editor of a web site, Dispatches From The Vanishing World 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. Shoumatoff has been called "the greatest writer in America" by Donald Trump and has been called "one of our greatest story tellers" by Graydon Carter.