Peter Stark is an adventurer and historian. Born in Wisconsin, he grew up in an adventurous and outdoorsy family and graduated from Dartmouth College. After taking a master's in journalism at the University of Wisconsin, and working briefly for The Missoulian newspaper in Montana, he set out to write adventure-travel articles about Greenland, Tibet and elsewhere for magazines such as Outside, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, and others. His 1997 article for Outside, "Frozen Alive," is considered a classic of the adventure genre and formed the basis for his book Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance, named Amazon's best outdoors book of 2001. With his wife, choreographer and writer Amy Ragsdale, and their two children, Stark and family lived for a year each in Mozambique and a remote region of Brazil.
After taking part in the harrowing "first descent" of Mozambique's 750-kilometer-long Lugenda River by kayak in 2002, Stark decided to pull back from edgy adventure himself and pivot toward exploration history. Based in Missoula, Montana, he now specializes in researching and writing historical accounts of early American explorers in wilderness settings and their contact with Indigenous peoples. His book Astoria, a New York Times bestseller in 2014, told the epic story of the first American colony on the West Coast (at the Columbia River's mouth) and was named a PEN USA finalist and made into a two-part play by Portland Center Stage. His Young Washington (2018) was named a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. He has recently completed a book about the struggle for the continent's center between the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh and the frontier governor (and later president) William Henry Harrison. Titled Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh's and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation, it was published by Random House on August 29th.
