Peter Hessler grew up in Columbia, Missouri and graduated from Hickman High School in 1988. His father was a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, and his mother teaches history at Columbia College. He became interested in literature and writing while in high school. He went on to study English and creative writing at Princeton University, where, during his junior year, he took John McPhee's renowned writing seminar. Hessler graduated in 1992 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at the University of Oxford. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps and spent the next two years teaching English at a local college in Fuling, China. He lived in Beijing as a freelance writer for a decade, but now lives in Colorado with his wife, journalist and writer Leslie T. Chang since 2007. Peter Hessler's Chinese name is (Hé W?i).

Hessler was the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic. He has previously written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and other American newspapers and magazines. He is best known for his two books on China: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001), a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China, and Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present (2006), a collection of journalistic stories he wrote while living in Beijing. While his stories are ostensibly about ordinary people's lives in China and are not motivated by politics, they nevertheless touch upon political issues or the lives of people who encountered problems during the Cultural Revolution, the central example being that of the story of the archaeologist Chen Mengjia and his wife, poet and translator Zhao Luorui (aka Lucy Chao). He released his newest book about China in 2010 called Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory (2010).

Books

• A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory (2010)
• A Journey Between China's Past and Present (2006)
• Two Years on the Yangtze (2001; Kiriyama Prize)

Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory

Released 9 February 2010, Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory records Peter Hessler's journey from northern Chinese counties, down to the factory towns of southern China. Hessler looks at the significant economic and industrial growth and development current in China .

Articles

• Abstract