Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958)About the Author: Ted Conover '80. Amherst College — Featured Book of the Month. Retrieved on February 22, 2022. is an American author and journalist who has been called a "master of immersion""The Origins of Immersion in Literary Journalism". Literary Journalism Studies. Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2017. and "master of experience-based narrative nonfiction.""Travel Writer: Ted Conover", January 1, 2011, citing Publishers Marketplace Publisher’s Lunch. A graduate of Amherst College and a former Marshall Scholar, he is also a professor emeritus and past director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University"A Letter from Ted Conover". New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute News Post. JUNE 19, 2020. Accessed February 22, 2022., where he taught graduate courses in the Literary Reportage concentration,Literary Reportage Faculty. New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. JUNE 19, 2020. Accessed February 22, 2022. as well as undergraduate courses on the "journalism of empathy" and undercover reporting.Biographical info from The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton (2005), pp. 3–30.
Early life and education
Ted Conover was born in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Denver, Colorado.Milofsky, David. "Book Beat: Conover’s Colorado roots". The Denver Post. July 1, 2010. Accessed February 22, 2022. He was a student at Hill Junior High School in Denver, where he gained his earliest journalism experiences. He went on to attend Denver's George Washington High School and then enrolled at Manual High School after court-ordered desegregation resulted in school reassignments—a development that contributed to his early interests in research experiences that cross social, cultural, and geographical borders (see Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver).Mulcahy, Joanne B. "Diving Deep: An Interview With Ted Conover". Creative Nonfiction. Issue 63. Accessed February 24, 2022. Conover finished high school in 1976 and went on to graduate summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Amherst College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.Ted Conover. The Future of Journalism Education. Accessed February 25, 2022. He was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University from 1982 to 1984 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 2001."Ted Conover: On the journalism of empathy". Newsworthy. Accessed February 25, 2022.
Career
Early journalism experiences Conover first began looking for ways to combine creative writing and journalism by writing articles for the Hill Junior High newspaper, Torch. For one Torch article, he interviewed actor Lloyd Haynes after a chance encounter during a family ski trip. The article earned Conover his first front-page news feature. In high school and during undergraduate summer breaks Conover worked for Colorado newspapers such as the Aurora Sentinel and the Lakewood Sentinel.Porter, William. "Immersion journalist Ted Conover to be honored". The Denver Post. April 7, 2011. Accessed February 22, 2022. He and a friend rode bicycles from Seattle to New Jersey the summer before they began college in Massachusetts.Conover, Ted. "Finishing". Bicycling!. May 1980. Accessed March 12, 2022. For a personal essay class the next year, he described the final hour of that journey; the professor liked the piece and Conover pitched it to Bicycling! Magazine. The resulting article, "Finishing", was his first freelance sale, according to Conover.
Conover took an American Society of Magazine Editors internship at U.S. News & World Report during his junior year at Amherst College, which led him to think he "might have a place in that profession." He credits anthropology courses he took at Amherst with adding rigor and depth to both his thinking and his journalistic writing. His senior thesis, "Between Freedom and Poverty: Railroad Tramps of the American West," was an ethnography of railroad hobos. He published an article about this research in the Amherst student journal In Other Words.Kroeger, Brooke. (2012).Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Illinois. The article was reprinted in the Amherst alumni magazine, where it caught the attention of a wire service reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts who then interviewed Conover about the article. The reporter's article led to appearances on The Today Show and National Public Radio. This publicity enabled Conover to catch the attention of New York literary agent Sterling Lord, who had helped launch the career of Jack Kerouac.Heilpern, John. "Out to Lunch with Sterling Lord". Vanity Fair. February 2013. Accessed February 22, 2022. Lord represented Conover for his first book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes, which was based on Conover's undergraduate research.
Writing career
Conover spent two years at Cambridge University after writing Rolling Nowhere. Building on his encounters while riding the rails with Mexican undocumented immigrants whom he described as "the true modern-day incarnation of the classic American hobo," Conover next spent a year traveling with Mexican migrants as research for what would become his 1987 book Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants.Conover, Ted. Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Illegal Migrants. 1987. Vintage Books, NY. During this year, he lived in a "feeder" valley in the Mexican state of Querétaro, spent time in Arizona, Idaho, California, and Florida, and crossed the US-Mexico border three times.
Conover next set his sights on the wealthy subculture of the mining-town-turned-lifestyle-capital of Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as a driver for the Mellow Yellow Taxi Company, for a catering company, and as a reporter for the Aspen Times in the late 1980s."Whiteout: Lost in Aspen". Publishers Weekly. November 4, 1991. Accessed February 24, 2022.Conover, Ted. Whiteout: Lost in Aspen. 1991. Vintage Books, NY.Sieg, Stina. "A Short History Of How Aspen Became The Glitzy Playground Of The Rich". Colorado Public Radio. March 25, 2019. Accessed February 24, 2022. His experiences were the basis for his 1991 book Whiteout: Lost in Aspen.
He moved to the East Coast in the 1990s and began writing for national publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.Oder, Norman. "In the Belly of the Beast: Ted Conover". Publishers Weekly. Accessed February 24, 2022. In the mid-1990s, amidst skyrocketing rates of incarceration, he applied for work as a New York State corrections officer.Bergner, Daniel. "Up the River". New York Times. May 14, 2000. Accessed February 24, 2022. He sought this position after the New York State Department of Corrections denied his request to shadow the department's employees in a journalistic role. Hired in 1997, Conover went through seven weeks of corrections officer training in Albany, New York, and then spent nearly a year working at Sing Sing prison in various entry-level custody posts throughout the prison. After resigning, Conover recounted his experiences in an article for The New YorkerConover, Ted. "Guarding Sing Sing". New York Times. March 26, 2000. Accessed February 24, 2022. and more fully in his 2000 book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Newjack was awarded the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award in General NonfictionThe National Book Critics Circle Award: 2000 Winners & Finalists. National Book Critics Circle. Accessed February 24, 2022. and was a finalist for the 2001 Journalism General Nonfiction category of the Pulitzer Prize.2001 Pulitzer Prizes: Journalism. The Pulitzer Prizes. Accessed February 24, 2022. The book was initially banned by the New York State Department of Corrections and could be confiscated from prisoner mail, but was later allowed on the condition that pages considered a threat to security be redacted prior to prisoners receiving the book.Conover, Ted. "Rehab". Guernica. May 24, 2012. Accessed February 24, 2022. As of 2019, Newjack was still banned in Arizona, Kansas, and Missouri state prisons.Publications: Mail – Banned Book Lists. Prison Legal News. Accessed February 24, 2022.
Conover's work for his next book—his 2011 The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World—focused on a central theme as observed across multiple continents: the role of roads and connectedness in shaping different aspects of human society.Conover, Ted. The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World. 2011. Vintage Books, NY. His research for this book took him to the Andes, East Africa and West Africa, the Middle East, China, and the Himalayas."The Routes of Man". Penguin Random House – Books. Accessed February 24, 2022.
In 2016 Conover published his book Immersion: A Writer's Guide To Going Deep as part of the University of Chicago Press Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing series.Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing. University of Chicago Press. Accessed February 24, 2022. In this book he focuses on the approach to writing he has developed over three decades of his career, touching on the practical and ethical challenges of immersive reporting, and citing examples from his own work and that of other writers such as Sebastian Junger, Anne Fadiman, Susan Orlean, and Jon Krakauer.Conover, Ted. Immersion: A Writer’s Guide To Going Deep. 2016. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Conover has explored additional subcultures and topics in articles for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, T Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Outside, Travel + Leisure, Smithsonian Magazine, and 5280.Articles. Ted Conover official website. 2022. Accessed February 24, 2022. During the autumn of 2012, Conover worked as a United States Department of Agriculture inspector and wrote about his beef inspection work at the Cargill Meat Solutions plant in Schuyler, Nebraska in the May 2013 issue of Harper's Magazine."Ted Conover Goes Undercover as a USDA Meat Inspector". Harper’s Magazine. April 15, 2013. Accessed February 25, 2022.
In August 2019 Harper's also published his long-form journalism piece "The Last Frontier: Homesteaders on the Margins of America."Conover, Ted. "The Last Frontier: Homesteaders on the margins of America". Harper’s Magazine. August 2019. Accessed February 25, 2022. It recounts his work as a rural outreach volunteer in Colorado’s expansive San Luis Valley for a local group called La Puente. That was the beginning of his most recent book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge (Knopf, 2022). Conover bought a small camper trailer and for two years rented space for it on a corner of a five-acre lot owned by the Gruber family, who were raising five daughters on the prairie. Eventually he bought his own five acres and set to work fixing up an old mobile home that had been abandoned there. “My investment wasn’t very large, but it did mark a big change in my status, at least in my mind, from frequent visitor to, well, neighbor,” he wrote.Conover, Ted. Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge. 2022. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. p. 141. Cheap Land Colorado was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New Yorker and one of “50 Notable Works of Nonfiction 2022” by The Washington Post.
Conover has performed several times on stage for The Moth and has been interviewed in podcasts and other forums.Ted Conover. The Moth. Accessed February 25, 2022.Ted Conover podcasts. Ted Conover. Accessed February 25, 2022. He sits on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common based at Amherst College.Amherst’s Award-Winning Literary Magazine. Amherst College – The Common. Accessed February 24, 2022.Conover, Ted. "Brown Road (1853-1932)". The Common. Issue 1. Accessed February 24, 2022.
Immersion approach