The White Death

McKay Jenkins holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a PhD in English. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution, he has also written for Outside, Orion, and many other publications. He is the author of What’s Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World;  Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 (Random House, 2005); The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe (Random House, 2003); The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (Random House, 2000); and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999). He is also the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader (Vintage, 2000). A winner of the University of Delaware’s Excellence in Teaching Award, Jenkins is currently Tilghman Professor of English and a member of the Program in Journalism. He lives in Baltimore with his family.