Alex Shoumatoff, (born November 4, 1946 in Mount Kisco, New York), is an American writer, known for his literary journalism, nature and environmental writing, and books and magazine pieces about political and environmental situations and world affairs. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine from 1978 to 1987, a founding contributing editor of Outside magazine and Condé Nast Traveler, and is a senior contributing editor to Vanity Fair, his main outlet since 1986. He is known for reporting on some of the most remote corners of the world.
He has 10 published books and since 2001 has been the editor of a web site, DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com, devoted to "documenting and raising awareness about the planet's rapidly disappearing natural and cultural diversity." Hundreds of pages of his writing are posted on the site [1]. Career highlights include an article he wrote about the mountain gorilla advocate Diane Fossey, which eventually became the film Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff was recently called "the greatest writer in America" by Donald Trump and was also recently called "one of our greatest story tellers" by Graydon Carter, the editor in chief at Vanity Fair. Shoumatoff may be, arguably, the most widely traveled magazine journalist with the broadest range in subject matter writing in English.
Shoumatoff comes from an old Russian family that goes back dozens of generations. He relates the family history, particularly of his grandparents' generation (aristocrats who fled the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and made new lives for themselves in America) in his 1982 book, Russian Blood (see part 1 and part 2 of the original New Yorker magazine excerpts from 1978). His paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, became a prominent portrait artist who was most notably painting President Franklin Roosevelt when he collapsed before her with a massive cerebral hemorrhage ending his life and famously escorted his mistress, Lucy Rutherford, away from the scene before the media arrived. Her brother, Andrey Avinoff, a "gentleman-in-waiting" to the Tsar at the time of the Russian revolution, and an artist and renowned lepidopterist, became the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh from 1925 to 1945. His paternal grandfather, Leo Shoumatoff, was the business manager of fellow-Russian-emigre Igor Sikorsky's aircraft company, which developed the helicopter and the first passenger airplane at the time. His other grandfather was a colonel in the Empress's cavalry guard. His father, Nicholas Shoumatoff, was an industrial and mechanical engineer who designed paper mills around the world, an entomologist, and alpine ecologist who wrote the books Europe's Mountain Center and Around the Roof of the World.
Shoumatoff grew up in the 1950s in Bedford, New York, an exurban enclave of old-line WASPs that is now most famously inhabited by George Soros, Ralph Lauren, Carl Icahn, Martha Stewart, and Donald Trump. He went to the local country-day school, Rippowam, where he later, in his mid-twenties, taught middle-school science. Upon his graduation from the eighth grade, the family moved to London and began to summer in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland. His father, a passionate mountain climber, took Shoumatoff and his older brother Nick up major peaks in the Alps. When he was four, his parents put him in a summer camp in Gstaad, Switzerland, where he learned to speak French.
Shoumatoff did his secondary schooling at St. Paul's School, a then all-boys boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, where he was at the top of his class and the captain of the squash team. When he was 16, having been blown away by a record of the South Carolina blues man Pink Anderson, he bought a guitar and wandered down to the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, where Izzy Young, who ran the operation, sent him to Harlem to take lessons from the Reverend Gary Davis, a forgotten blind black southern country blues guitar player, who was living in a shack behind a row of condemned buildings and playing in the street. Davis would have a huge impact on Shoumatoff and would become the subject of Shoumatoff's first published magazine piece.
He was admitted to Harvard University as a sophomore. He studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder and was on the Harvard Lampoon. His senior year roommates included Douglas Kenney, who went on to write the scripts of Animal House and Caddyshack and to found the National Lampoon.
Graduating at 1968 into the turbulence of the late 1960s, Shoumatoff planned on becoming a poet in the great tradition that he had been studying in college, but after hearing the young Dylan's "Another Side of Bob Dylan", he aspired to be a songwriter. After a brief stint on the Washington Post as a night police reporter, with a draft classification of I-A and having no desire to go to the Vietnam War, he enlisted in an obscure Marine Corps reserve intelligence unit, which trained him to be parachuted behind the Iron Curtain and to melt into the local population. He was given intensive Russian Language schooling in Monterey, California, and there he fell in with the psychedelic counterculture, which was in full flower on the coast. Now 22 years old, he realized that he had made a huge mistake thinking he could do what the Marines were expecting, including the interrogation techniques they were teaching him. He turned to the Reverend Gary Davis with his moral predicament, and Davis made him a minister in a heated moment in a store-front church in Harlem. This enabled him to get an honorable, IV-D discharge from the Marines (the D standing for Divinity).
In 1970 Shoumatoff chose to "drop out" with his "old lady", Mary Lee Coe, a girl from Colorado, and they lived on an old farm in New Hampshire. Here, he taught French at a local college and drove a school bus, wrote songs at the rate of two or three a day and became deeply interested in birds, then trees and mushrooms, and eventually every form of life, following the naturalist tradition that ran so strongly his family. (His older brother by then was the curator of the nature museum in a county park in their native Westchester County). Breaking up with Mary Lee in the fall, he drifted out to northern California, hanging out on a succession of communes and playing music around bonfires and writing more songs. There, he sold his profile of Gary Davis for $300 to Rolling Stone, then a broadside printed on newsprint that chronicled the progress (and eventual demise) of the Sixties counterculture, and got a song-writing contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, and Doc Watson. He went to New York City to perform his songs but was not confident enough in his singing and guitar-playing to put them over on strange urban audiences, and ended up instead writing for magazines, starting with the Village Voice. He developed a piece on Florida into his first book, Florida Ramble, and married his editor's assistant, Leslie Ann Moore. The young newlyweds lived in the Marsh Sanctuary in Mount Kisco, where he was its resident naturalist, and there was an overgrown Greek amphitheater that Isadora Duncan had danced in, which he restored and put on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream The marriage lasted only two years, and the heartbroken Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York took off for the Amazon which he had been longing to explore since listening to the accounts of his Harvard pal Timothy Plowman, who was a student of the legendary ethnobotanist of the Amazon Richard Evans Schultes. Also since seeing the film "Black Orpheus" and listening to the bossa records of Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, he was eager to get to Brazil and away from many of the racial barriers that existed in the States. He spent nine months in the rainforest, making the first ethnobotanical collection in the recently-first-contacted Cayapo Indian village of Mekranoti, getting to a remote Yanomamo Indian village where that no one from the outside world had set foot in, and nearly dying of falciparum malaria. His book on the experience is a riveting account titled The Rivers Amazon, which was published by Sierra Club Press, and compared by reviewers with the classic books on the Amazon by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Walter Bates.
Returning to Mount Kisco with a beautiful young Brazilian wife and his perspective permanently altered, he learned that his Westchester book had been taken by the New Yorker and joined its staff in 1978, the year his first son, Andre, was born. Nicholas Neto followed, and the family bought a house in Katonah, then moved down to New Rochelle. Shoumatoff established himself as "consistently the farthest-flung of the New Yorker's far-flung correspondents", as the New York Times described him, doing pieces on the pygmies in the Ituri Forest, on the lemurs of Madagascar, tracing the legendary Amazon women up a tributary of the Amazon, the Nhamunda, that no one except the local Indians and mestizos had been up since a Frenchman in 1890.
On these trips, Shoumatoff took along a small traveling guitar to break the ice and jam with locals. On his frequent trips to Brazil, which he ended up writing four books about, he met the masters of bossa nova, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa, and wrote the first piece in English (for the New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town"), about tropicalia's sophisticated heartthrob Caetano Veloso, and his own southern country blues and ragtime guitar-playing style began to acquire a samba beat. In Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he jammed with Okay Jazz, Le Grand Maitre Franco's famous Zairian rumba band, and became a close friend with the ethnomusiciologist and bass player Benoit Quersin (who played on Chet Baker's legendary 1956 recording in Paris). Quersin would accompany him on several of his adventures into remote, unknown corners of the world, including Madagascar and up the Nhamunda in the Amazon. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a book on "cultural ecology" in the tropics (In Southern Light).
During his early writing period, Shoumatoff focused on mastering "long fact writing", as it was called at the New Yorker, which was edited by William Shawn. He learned precision of language from its masterful editors and its famously rigorous checking department. Shoumatoff recorded everything that he was told, observed, or thought, in to date over 360 little red Chinese notebooks, filling some 70,000 pages. The New Yorker gave its writers free rein, allowing them to choose what they wanted to write about, at whatever length they felt was needed. To this day Shoumatoff, in his commitment to giving the reader, to the best of his ability, "the full picture, in all its complexity and ambiguity", still writes very long, to the consternation of some magazine editors.
Most of his books, beginning with Florida Ramble, and continuing to his last published book, Legends of the American Desert, are comprehensive portraits of places (a state, a county, a rainforest, a desert), and often originated with a magazine article. They identify and present, in an easy-to-read mixture of travelogue and exposition, elements that Shoumatoff believes make the place the way it is: flora and fauna; natural, cultural, and political history; local dialects and belief systems. His writing is often characterized by a fascination with "the Other", disenchantment with the modern consumer culture, and an insatiable curiosity. According to the essayist Edward Hoagland, "admirably protean, encyclopedic, and indefatigable, Shoumatoff has the curiosity of an army of researchers and writes like a house afire." Shoumatoff also appeals to, frequently works with, and his work often crosses with, work in cultural anthropology and other specialists of species, culture, or music.
In 1986 Shoumatoff wrote his first piece for Vanity Fair, about the murder of Dian Fossey, which was made into the movie Gorillas in the Mist. Shoumatoff became one of the newly resurrected magazine's stars, writing about everything from the fall of Paraguay's dictator Alfredo Stroessner (see Dispatch #28) to trying to pinpoint the source, in central Africa, of the AIDS virus. In 1990, his book The World Is Burning, about the murder of the president of the Amazon Rubber-Tappers' Union Chico Mendes, was optioned by the actor/producer Robert Redford, but the movie was never made. In the early 1990s, he became obsessed with golf, and to justify all the time he was spending on the links, he invented a new form of journalism..."post-gonzo, participant-observer, dada"...that he called "investigative golf." (See Dispatch #12, Annals of Investigative Golf: The Gavea Golf Club in Rio de Janeiro). Two of his more famous golf pieces were one in 1994 which former President Bill Clinton's golf buddies extensively and specifically discussed his extra-marital affairs prior to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Esquire Magazine would not print; and another piece about playing with O.J. Simpson's golf buddies that revealed that Simpson may have hidden the murder weapon in his golf bag. He also profiled Uma Thurman and her father, Buddhist Robert Thurman, for a feature in Vanity Fair. During this era, related to these articles, Shoumatoff also appeared several times on tabloid T.V. shows such as Inside Edition, (then hosted by political commentator Bill O'Reilly), and E! True Hollywood Story.
In the mid-late 1990s, realizing that many of the places that he had been writing about since the 1970s had been changed drastically by the West's appetite for goods, he strengthened his focus on the environment and an interest in creating a written record of these places and/or cultures and species. He wrote about global warming and the Kyoto conference (see Dispatch #5) in 1997, and started his Web site four years later. He was also selected as the correspondent from Vanity Fair to profile Al Gore for the 2000 election in a piece (that was never published).
In 1997, his book Legends of the American Desert: Sojourns in the Greater Southwest, (Knopf, 1997) was published to high acclaim. It was on the cover of the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle book reviews, was named a New York Times notable book of 1997, Time magazine and New York Post's top ten books of 1997, and Mountain and Plains Booksellers' Association best non-fiction book of 1997. This is Shoumatoff's last published book.
Having back-burned his music career for 37 years, he also recorded his first compact disk, Suitcase on the Loose, produced by his longtime friend Kate McGarrigle (the mother of Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright), and featured on VanityFair.com including his song from the 70's Pennsylvania Turnpike Blues that was featured on NPR's weekend edition of All Things Considered before the 2008 Pennsylvania primary.
He continues to write hard-hitting environmental, social, and political pieces primarily for Vanity Fair and has said recently that he plans to devote his remaining literary, traveling, and networking energies to doing what he can to help avert the coming collapse of many of the planet's life-support system due to human overpopulation and hyper-consumption.
In 2007, Shoumatoff posted a reflection on all the changes he had seen and experienced A Writer Looks At His Career that is a memorable exercise into the writing and magazine world. He also delivered a new book on Tibetan Buddhism to Houghton Mifflin that is currently remaining unpublished. In 1988 he was divorced from his second wife and married a woman from Uganda, Rosette, and had three more boys who today are early teenagers. They reside in Montreal
