Ted Conover
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Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958, in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Denver, Colorado) is an American author and journalist. A graduate of Denver's Manual High School and Amherst College and a Marshall Scholar, he is also a distinguished writer-in-residence in the Department of Journalism at New York University. He currently teaches a graduate course titled "The Journalism of Empathy" and an undergraduate course titled "Beyond Google: Creative Research."
Conover's books of narrative nonfiction have typically been enterprising explorations of off-beat social worlds. He will often become an active participant in the subculture he is writing about. His first experiment with this melding of anthropological and journalistic method took place in 1980, when he rode freight railroads back and forth across the western United States with some of the last remaining hoboes. This experience, initially rendered as an ethnography for a honors thesis, became the basis of his first-person book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes.
Many of those Conover met on the rails were Mexican nationals, and in his next book, Coyotes, he describes them as "the true modern-day incarnation of the classic American hobo." Conover spent a year traveling with Mexicans in order to write Coyotes: he lived in a "feeder" valley in the Mexican state of Querétaro, spent time in Arizona, Idaho, California, and Florida, and crossed the border three times. His now famous account, in print since 1987, came out in a new edition in 2006 with a new preface and subtitle: "A Journey Across Border With America's Mexican Migrants."
His next project, which he has stated he undertook in part to see whether the participatory approach could work with wealthier people, describes life in the mining-town-turned-lifestyle-capital of Aspen, Colorado, where Conover worked as a driver for the Mellow Yellow Taxi Company, the Aspen Times, and for a catering company. The result was Whiteout: Lost in Aspen.
His most recent (and most startling) project was to take a job at Sing Sing prison in New York state, where he worked for nearly a year—without the state's knowledge—as a rookie correction officer. The resulting book, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, among other honors. For many months, prisoners and their visitors were banned from reading Newjack; now, inmates who receive a copy have to wait up to several months while the state redacts several pages that it considers a threat to security.
In addition to books, much of Conover's work has been published in magazines. He frequently contributes to the The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, Travel & Leisure Family, and others. (For a full list, see www.tedconover.com/articles.) He has said that his next project will be a book about roads.
[edit] Bibliography
- Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes - Paperback: 304 pages, Publisher: Vintage (September 11, 2001), ISBN 0-307-727-868
- Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Illegal Migrants - Paperback: 288 pages, Publisher: Vintage Departures (August 12, 1987), ISBN 0-394-75518-9
- Whiteout: Lost In Aspen - Publisher: Vintage (September 11, 2001), ISBN 0-679-974-178
- Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing - Hardcover: 336 pages, Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (May 2, 2000), ISBN 0-375-50177-0. Paperback: 352 pages, Publisher: Vintage (June 12, 2001), ISBN 0-375-72662-4
