Alec Wilkinson

Who is Alec Wilkinson?

Alec Wilkinson is a writer who has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1980. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer he is among the "first rank of" contemporary American "literary journalists... of Naipaul, Norman Mailer and Agee." He is the author of ten books: "Midnights,", "Moonshine,", "Big Sugar,", "The Riverkeeper,", "A Violent Act, "My Mentor,", "Mr. Apology,", "The Happiest Man in the World,", the latter about Poppa Neutrino, the only man to cross the Atlantic in a raft made of trash, and "The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger,". His most recent book is "The Ice Balloon,", the account of the Swedish visionary aeronaut S.A. Andree's attempt, in 1897, to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon. Before Wilkinson was a writer, he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, which is the subject of "Midnights," and before that he was a rock and roll musician, playing in a number of bands, including one in Berkeley, California with Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan's longtime bass player and bandleader.