Background

Ethnicity: Sebastian Junger's father was of Russian, Austrian, Spanish, and Italian descent.

Sebastian Junger was born on January 17, 1962, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He is the son of Miguel and Ellen Sinclair Junger.

Education

Sebastian Junger attended National Outdoor Leadership School. He graduated from Concord Academy in 1980. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in cultural anthropology from Wesleyan University in 1984.

Career

Sebastian Junger started writing for local newspapers at the age of twenty-two. He had some other jobs before becoming a writer. His first book The Perfect Storm was published in 1997. With this book, he quickly established himself as a bestselling writer of literary nonfiction, combining the journalist’s clarity and eye for detail with the novelist’s sense of narrative and drama. The Perfect Storm tells the story of a commercial swordfishing boat caught in the grip of a killer storm. Drawing on interviews, radio dialogues, court depositions, and various other sources, Junger depicts a New England fishing community and the dangerous lives of the fishermen with gritty realism and even recreates what the final harrowing hours of the main character must have been like.

The author also recounts tales of the storm’s survivors, including Air National Guard rescue workers forced to abandon their helicopter and ride out the storm at sea. In addition to exploring the human interest of the events surrounding the sinking of the Andrea Gail, Junger offers a great deal of historical and technical information on such topics as the commercial swordfishing industry, the formation of storms, fluid mechanics, naval architecture, and the experience of drowning. Junger’s desire to write about the fishermen’s fate stemmed from having witnessed the 1991 storm firsthand and from having prior experience working a dangerous job, as a high-climber for tree-removal companies.

His other notable works include Fire (2001), A Death in Belmont (2006), War (2010), Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). As a journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world. He contributes to periodicals, including Men’s Journal, Outside, American Heritage, and New York Times Magazine. His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000, profiling Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud became the subject of the National Geographic documentary Into the Forbidden Zone and introduced America to the Afghan resistance fighting the Taliban.

Junger is also a documentary filmmaker, who debuted in 2010 with a film Restrepo. Restrepo, which chronicled the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. Junger has since produced and directed additional documentaries about war and its aftermath.

Which Way Is The Front Line From Here? chronicles the life and career of his friend and colleague, photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed while covering the civil war in Libya in 2011. Korengal returns to the subject of combat and tries to answer the eternal question of why young men miss war. The Last Patrol examines the complexities of returning from the war by following Junger and three friends - all of whom had experienced combat, either as soldiers or reporters - as they travel up the East Coast railroad lines on foot as "high-speed vagrants."

Achievements

• Sebastian Junger has been listed as a notable journalist and writer by Marquis. He received the National Magazine Award, PEN New England Award, Peabody Award, and the 2010 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His book War was named by Time magazine a Top Ten Non-fiction Book of 2010.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Fire

    (In Fire, Sebastian Junger brings to bear the same meticul...)

    2001
  • War

    (In War, Sebastian Junger turns his brilliant and empathet...)

    2010
  • The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

    (In The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea...)

    1997
  • Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

    (Decades before the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin...)

    2016
  • A Death in Belmont

    (In the spring of 1963, the quiet suburb of Belmont, Massa...)

    2006

• video

  • Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS

    (Pulling from nearly 1, 000 hours of visceral footage, the...)

    2017
  • Korengal

    (The film Korengal continues to follow the soldiers in Bat...)

    2014
  • Which Way is the Front Line From Here?

    (On April 20, 2011, photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetheri...)

    2013
  • Restrepo

    (The men of Restrepo urge an Afghan man to take his injure...)

    2010
  • Going to War

    (What is it really like to go to war? For millennia, only ...)

    2018
  • The Last Patrol

    (Going to war is confusing, but it's nothing compared to t...)

    2014

Views

Sebastian Junger was greatly influenced by John McPhee, Cormac McCarthy, Ted Conover, Alec Wilkenson, Barry Lopez, Joan Didion, Pete Matthiessen, Norman Maclean, and Michael Herr. Love of adventure drew him to a writing career.

Quotations: "I write because it thrills me. I write journalism - not fiction - because it thrusts me out there into the world and I’m so awed by what I find."

"For me, PTSD is just one lens to look at a broader question of our society - the very common sense of loneliness, the lack of communal utility that people sense, like, 'What am I here for? Who am I helping? Who needs me?' That's a societal problem and not a personal problem."

"Western society has this narrative that we're moving steadily toward a kind of societal perfection. And in some ways we are. The improvements are amazing. But there's this massive unseen cost which is our sense of connectedness to the group, and that connectedness to the group has been at the core of our definition of what it means to be human for 200,000 years. For the first time in history it's being challenged, it's being corroded. Then when soldiers experience life in the platoon or when earthquake survivors experience a brief communal survival effort, everyone's shocked by how good it feels, even though the circumstances are horrible. When really it's people re-experiencing their evolutionary origins of being in this small inter-reliant life. And it feels good. It feels real good."

"Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it."

"The suicide rate keeps going up, which is odd for a society that's this wealthy and well-off. It's not that suicide is increasing among the very poor. It's actually increasing among the affluent. That, to me, says there's something literally deadly about social isolation, the kind of individualism that typifies our modern society."

"There's clearly an adaptive trait in humans, which is to act individually if you possibly can. That's part of our evolutionary heritage as well. I think we're programmed to do that up until the point where doing that endangers us or degrades the quality of our life; then we act communally."

"Are we a human society? In evolutionary terms, no we are not. We do not elevate the moral values that have always kept humans safe and happy and secure for hundreds of thousands of years. We do not elevate those qualities on a national level. In that sense, we are way outside of our evolutionary past and, in many ways, are an anti-human society."

"The poorer the society, the more collaborative people have to be. Collaboration is what humans are wired for because evolutionarily, that's how we've survived. Even in terrible times, cooperating makes people feel good."

Personality

Sebastian Junger has coffee on his desk and listens to music when he writes. He rarely smokes but sometimes he has a cigarette when he‘s finished a section and he's reading it over.

He's terrified of spiders.

Interests

• Music & Bands

  Tom Waits, The Pogues, Latin Playboys, Rachid Taha, Cheb Khaled, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Morphine, Queens of the Stone Age, R. L. Burnsides, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Los Lobos, J. J. Cale, Steve Earl, Richard Thompson, Big Head Todd, The Black Keys

Connections

Sebastian Junger's wife was Daniela Junger from 2002 till 2014. The marriage produced one child.

Father:

Miguel Junger

Mother:

Ellen Junger

ex-wife:

Daniela Petrova

Daniela Petrova grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Sofia, Bulgaria. She came to the United States in her early twenties. She writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, and Marie Claire. Her first novel, Her Daughter’s Mother, was published in June 2019.

colleague:

Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington worked first for The Big Issue, a magazine sold by the homeless, and later as a regular contributor to The Independent newspaper. As a freelance photographer and filmmaker, Hetherington was interested in creating diverse forms of visual narratives from long-term projects. He spent eight years focused on stories in Africa, living in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. In Liberia he covered the Second Civil War behind the lines with rebel fighters, helping to film James Brabazon’s Liberia: An Uncivil War (2004). While covering the conflict in Misrata, Libya, Tim Hetherington was killed on 20 April 2011.