Alexander Shoumatoff

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. In 1986, he wrote an article about the murder of Diane Fossey that was optioned to become the movie Gorillas in the Mist.

Books in order of publication:

• Florida Ramble. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. 
• The Rivers Amazon. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. 1978. 
• The Capital of Hope. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. 1978. 
• Westchester, Portrait of a County. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. 1979. 
• Russian Blood. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. 1982. 
• The Mountain of Names. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1985. 
• In Southern Light: Trekking through Zaire and the Amazon. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1986.
• African Madness. New York: A.A. Knopf. 1988. 
• The World is Burning. Boston: Little, Brown. 1990. 
• Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest. New York: Knopf. 1997. 
• The Wasting of Borneo: Dispatches from a Vanishing World. Boston: Beacon Press. 2017.