A collection of Quammen's drafts, research, and correspondence is housed in Texas Tech University's Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection consists of approximately 63 boxes of publicly available literary production, artifacts, maps, and other papers dated from 1856–2014.[3]
During his graduate work at Oxford, he studied literature, concentrating on the works of American writer William Faulkner. After completing his education and publishing his first novel, he relocated to Bozeman, Montana. He has continued to live there with his wife, Betsy (Gaines) Quammen,[5] a conservation activist.[4]
Career
In the early 1970s, Quammen moved to Montana for trout fishing. In 1983, he finished The Soul of Viktor Tronko, a spy novel based on Russian historical events. A year later, the story collection Blood Line: Stories of Fathers and Sons was published. Following the commercial failure of his fictional works, Quammen began transitioning into a nonfiction writer.[6]
In 1981, Quammen began writing columns for Outside Magazine, and continued for fifteen years. Some of the columns from Outside Magazine and others contributed to Quammen's nonfiction books: Natural Acts (1985), The Flight of the Iguana (1988), Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (1998), and The Boilerplate Rhino (2000).[6]
Later in 1999, Quammen began to write a series of three stories following J. Michael Fay's 2000-mile hike through Central Africa for National Geographic. During this time, Quammen walked with Fay for eight weeks along African river basins. Quammen continued working with National Geographic, holding a Contributing Writer position, producing cover stories like "Was Darwin Wrong?" and "The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion."[6]
Quammen, David. The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Quammen, David. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. New York, W. W. Norton, 2003.
Quammen, David. Alexis Rockman. New York: Monacelli Press, 2004.
Quammen, David. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Quammen, David. The Kiwi's Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
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