Background

Peter Hessler was born on June 14, 1969, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He grew up in Columbia, Missouri, United States.

Education

Peter Hessler graduated from Hickman High School in 1988. Then he studied English and creative writing at Princeton University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1992. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to study English language and literature at the University of Oxford where he received in 1994 his second Bachelor of Arts degree.

Career

The summer before graduating from Princeton, Hessler worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri. He wrote an extensive ethnography about a small town called Sikeston, which was published in the Journal for Applied Anthropology.

In 1996, Peter Hessler joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer English teacher. For two years, he had lived in Fuling, a small city affected by the Three Gorges Dam. He wrote about it in his first book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. This book was followed by two others about China: Oracle Bones and Country Driving. Together they comprise Hessler’s “China trilogy,” covering the decade in which he lived in the country, from 1996 until 2007.

Hessler then moved to Beijing, where he became the China correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributing writer to National Geographic in 2000. He had lived in China for 11 years, completing a trilogy that also includes Oracle Bones and Country Driving.

In 2007 he settled in Ridgway, Colorado and has continued to publish articles in The New Yorker on topics including the Peace Corps in Nepal and small towns in Colorado. In 2011, Hessler moved to Cairo, where for five years he had covered the events of the Egyptian Arab Spring.

One of his last books is entitled The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution.

Achievements

• Each of Peter Hessler's books are included in the “China Trilogy” made the New York Times bestseller list. His books have been translated into fourteen languages. His book Oracle Bones was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006. In 2011, Hessler received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in recognition and encouragement of his "keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China."
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West

    (Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit o...)

    2013
  • River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

    (In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terrac...)

    2001
  • Oracle Bones

    (In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the tension betwe...)

    2006
  • Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

    (Through three distinct stories, Country Driving tracks th...)

    2010
  • The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution

    (Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and ...)

    2019

Views

One of his main feelings about writing is that, over time, there’s a risk of complacency and comfort. If he gets too comfortable or if the surroundings become too familiar, then he won’t be as observant. He feels like this is part of the commitment to being a nonfiction writer: he has to remain close to his subject matter, but willing to change his environment. He would like to think that the experience of moving frequently has also helped him sympathize with other points of view. People view the world very differently in China and Egypt and Colorado. His goal isn’t to choose the worldview that is correct. He's just trying to describe each one accurately.

Quotations: “The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.”

“I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.”

“People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on.”

“In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.”

Interests

• playing chess

Connections

Hessler is married to Leslie T. Chang. They are the parents of twin daughters Ariel and Natasha born in 2010. In October of 2011, when the girls were a year and a half old, the family moved to Cairo.

Wife:

Leslie T. Chang

Leslie T. Chang is a former Wall Street Journal writer who is the author of Factory Girls.

Daughter:

Ariel

Daughter:

Natasha