35 Facts About Alex Shoumatoff

Alexander Shoumatoff was born on November 4,1946 and 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.

Alex Shoumatoff authored 11 books and was a founding contributing editor of Outside Magazine and Conde Nast Traveler.

Alex Shoumatoff grew up in the nearby town of Bedford, New York, an community known for famous people and business leaders.

Alex Shoumatoff went to the local country-day school, Rippowam School, where he later taught middle-school science in his mid-twenties.

Alex Shoumatoff's friends included future Presidential candidate John Kerry who he eventually profiled in 1996.

Alex Shoumatoff was admitted to Harvard University in 1964, as a sophomore where he studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder.

Alex Shoumatoff was on the Harvard Lampoon and his senior-year roommates included Douglas Kenney, founder of National Lampoon whose work included the films Animal House and Caddyshack and was a national-champion squash player.

Alex Shoumatoff descends from a family of Russian nobility that he traced back dozens of generations in his 1982 book, Russian Blood.

The Alex Shoumatoff family were originally Baltic German Schumacher and had migrated to St Petersburg and been ennobled under Peter the Great.

Alex Shoumatoff's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Alex Shoumatoff, was the portrait artist who was painting President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 when he collapsed before her and died and was a household name during his childhood.

Alex Shoumatoff's great uncle, Andrey Avinoff, who served as the father-figure for his father, was a diplomat and "gentleman-in-waiting" to Csar Nicholas II at the time of the Soviet Revolution, served as the translator of Russian for the Treaty of Versailles, was likely the world's top lepidopterist through the 1920s in expeditions as far as to Tibet which were financed by Nicholas II, and was the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh from 1925 to 1945.

Alex Shoumatoff's father, Nicholas Shoumatoff, was an engineer who designed many of the paper mills around the world, and was an entomologist and well-known alpine ecologist who wrote the books Europe's Mountain Center and Around the Roof of the World.

Alex Shoumatoff was given Russian Language schooling in Monterey, California.

Alex Shoumatoff turned to his New York City guitar teacher, the Reverend Gary Davis and Davis made him a minister in a heated moment in a store-front church in Harlem.

In 1969, rather than returning to The Washington Post to become their Moscow correspondent under editor Ben Bradlee, Alex Shoumatoff chose to "drop out" with his girlfriend and they moved to an old farm in New Hampshire.

Alex Shoumatoff taught French at a local college, drove a school bus and under heavy cannabis use and was engrossed in nature.

Alex Shoumatoff went to New York City to perform his songs but instead ended up writing for magazines, starting with The Village Voice.

Alex Shoumatoff developed a piece on Florida into his first book, Florida Ramble, and married his editor's assistant.

The marriage lasted only two years and Alex Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York, left for the Amazon Rainforest.

Alex Shoumatoff established himself as "consistently one of the farthest-flung of The New Yorker's far-flung correspondents", as The New York Times described him, and he wrote pieces on pygmies in the Ituri Forest, lemurs of Madagascar, and traced the legend of Amazon women to a tributary of the Amazon called the Nhamunda, which no white person had visited since a Frenchman in 1890.

Alex Shoumatoff is known for his style of long fact writing which was developed at The New Yorker under the editorship of William Shawn.

Alex Shoumatoff began recording his thoughts into the pages of little red Chinese notebooks, which there are hundreds of today.

Alex Shoumatoff's writing is often characterized by a fascination with "The Other", a disenchantment with the modern consumer culture, and exhaustive amount of detail that he developed at the New Yorker.

In 1986, Alex Shoumatoff wrote his first piece for Vanity Fair, about the murder of Dian Fossey.

Alex Shoumatoff was considered to be one of the newly resurrected magazine's stars by then-editor Tina Brown.

Alex Shoumatoff wrote an account of the fall of Paraguay's dictator Alfredo Stroessner, which was the sole subject of Brown's introduction to the issue.

In 1987, Alex Shoumatoff attempted to pinpoint the source of the AIDS virus in central Africa which was developed into the book African Madness.

Alex Shoumatoff married Rosette Rwigamba, a Rwandan Tutsi, in her village in Uganda, to whom he remains married.

Alex Shoumatoff profiled Uma Thurman and her father, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, for a cover feature in Vanity Fair.

Alex Shoumatoff wrote about global warming and the United States' failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Alex Shoumatoff believing that many of the places that he had been writing about since the 1970s had been drastically changed by the West's appetite for goods.

In late 2008, Alex Shoumatoff was arrested for sneaking into the Bohemian Grove for a piece that was published by Vanity Fair.

Alex Shoumatoff recorded his only musical album with longtime friend Kate McGarrigle, the mother of Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright, that was featured on NPR's weekend edition of All Things Considered during the Pennsylvania primary for the 2008 primary election.

In 2017, Alex Shoumatoff's last published book, The Wasting of Borneo was published.

Alex Shoumatoff has lived in Montreal since 1998 and is still writing, working primarily with magazines such as Smithsonian and is active on speaker circuits about writing.