A Walk In The Woods

Foreword

This book describes the author’s experience while walking the Appalachian Trail and reflects his opinions relating to those experiences. Some names and identifying details of individuals mentioned in the book have been changed to protect their privacy.

A Walk in the Woods is a laugh-out-loud account of an outrageously rugged hike by a beloved comic author.

Bill Bryson decided in 1996 to walk the 2,100-mile Appalachian trail. Winding from Georgia to Maine, this uninterrupted ‘hiker’s highway’ sweeps through the heart of some of America ’s most beautiful and treacherous terrain. Bryson risked snake bite and hantavirus to trudge up unforgiving mountains, plod through swollen rivers, and yearn for cream sodas and hot showers. This amusingly ill-conceived adventure brings Bryson to the height of his comic powers, but his acute eye also observes an astonishing landscape of silent forests, sparkling lakes, and other national treasures that are often ignored or endangered.

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. A backpacking expedition in 1973 brought him to England where he met his wife and settled until 1995. He now lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and four children.

The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson’s hilarious first travel book, chronicled a trip in his mother’s chevy around small town America. Since then, he has written several more about the UK and the US, including notable bestsellers, A Walk in the Woods, I’m A Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country and, most recently, A Short History of Nearly Everything.