Alex Shoumatoff | |
|---|---|
 Shoumatoff in The Amazon Rainforest in 1976 | |
| Born | Alexander Shoumatoff November 4, 1946 Mount Kisco, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Magazine journalist, author |
| Period | 1970–2022 |
| Genre | Politics, Dictators, Environment, Places |
| Relatives | Elizabeth Shoumatoff (grandmother), Andrey Avinoff (great uncle) |
| Website | |
| dispatchesfromthevanishingworld | |
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.[citation needed] In 1986, he wrote an article about the murder of Dian Fossey that was optioned to become the movie Gorillas in the Mist. [citation needed]
Shoumatoff was called "consistently the farthest flung of the far-flung writers at The New Yorker" by The New York Times,[1] "the greatest writer in America" by Donald Trump,[2] and "one of our greatest storytellers" by Graydon Carter.[citation needed]
- ^ McDowell, Edwin (9 November 1987). "Gottlieb Reign Alters The New Yorker". The New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2024.
- ^ "Trump - 'between you and me I'm going to get it'". The Scotsman. April 2, 2008. Retrieved June 8, 2016.