Background
Tim Cahill was born in 1944, in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Cahill was transplanted to more northerly terrain by his parents at an early age, he would spend most of his youth in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Cahill enrolled in classes at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in European intellectual history.
1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco, CA 94132, United States
Cahill was awarded his Master of Arts degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Cahill discusses changing world of travel
Tim Cahill signs autographs for young readers
United States
From 1971 to 1976, Cahill worked as an associate editor and staff writer for the Rolling Stone Magazine.
United States
For a year from 1976, Cahill served as a founding editor of the Outside magazine. He is a current "Editor at Large" for the magazine.
(The author of A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Pecked to ...)
The author of A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Pecked to Death by Ducks gives new meaning to the words "going to extremes" in this exhilarating--and frequently hilarious--collection of adventure travel writing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679770798/?tag=2022091-20
1987
(Tim Cahill reports on the road trip to end all road trips...)
Tim Cahill reports on the road trip to end all road trips: a journey that took him from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in a record-breaking twenty three and a half days.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394758374/?tag=2022091-20
1991
(In his latest tour of the earth's remote, exotic, and dis...)
In his latest tour of the earth's remote, exotic, and dismal places, the author of Road Fever and A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg sleeps with a grizzly bear, witnesses demonic possession in Bali, and survives a run-in with something called the Throne of Doom in Guatemala. Vivid and outrageously funny.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679749292/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(In Pass the Butterworms, Cahill takes us to the steppes o...)
In Pass the Butterworms, Cahill takes us to the steppes of Mongolia, where he spends weeks on horseback alongside the descendants of Genghis Khan and masters the “Mongolian death trot”, and other places.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375701117/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(In over 30 scathingly funny pieces, a diverse array of au...)
In over 30 scathingly funny pieces, a diverse array of authors shows just how quickly a pleasant vacation can turn into an embarrassing anecdote.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932361448/?tag=2022091-20
2000
(Hold the Enlightenment takes Tim Cahill to sites as far-f...)
Hold the Enlightenment takes Tim Cahill to sites as far-flung as Saharan salt mines, the Congolese jungle, and Hanford, Washington, home of the largest toxic-waste dump in the Western hemisphere.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003E8AIGG/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(Tales of Scrapes and Narrow Escapes; The Irresponsible Tr...)
Tales of Scrapes and Narrow Escapes; The Irresponsible Traveller is a light but edgy collection of true tales about the stickiest situations in which travel writers and travel celebrities have found themselves over the years.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1841625620/?tag=2022091-20
2014
Tim Cahill was born in 1944, in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Cahill was transplanted to more northerly terrain by his parents at an early age, he would spend most of his youth in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
After graduating from high school, Cahill enrolled in classes at the University of Wisconsin, where he eventually earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in European intellectual history. He then gave law school a trial run, but he knew it wasn’t for him. After a semester or so he left the world of torts and malfeasance for San Francisco State University, and was awarded his Master of Arts degree in creative writing a few years later.
At the beginning of his career, Cahill worked variously as a lifeguard, longshoreman and warehouse worker. After that, Cahill decided to get a job where he could use less brawn and more brains: he found it at the San Francisco office of Rolling Stone magazine, where he signed on as an associate editor and staff writer in 1971. Five years later, Rolling Stone packed up its West Coast office and moved east to New York City. That same year, the publishers decided to start a new magazine, Outside.
Because of Cahill’s skill as an editor and his abiding interest in the outdoors, he was the logical choice to be Outside’s founding editor. He focused on organizing and publishing the new periodical, while also finding time to begin a column called “Out There.” By 1977, however, Cahill had enough of the city. He turned over his management duties and became one of the magazine’s most frequent contributors by keeping his column and serving as a contributing editor. From his new home in Livingston, Montana, he embarked on a career as freelance writer.
With lighthearted titles like Jaguars Ripped My Flesh: Adventure is a Risky Business and A Wolverine Ate My Leg, his books recall the bravado of adventurers of yore and swiftly undercut it with a sense of fun. Whether it be hang gliding or parachuting, mountain climbing or sea kayaking, hacking his way through jungle underbrush or traversing seemingly endless stretches of desert a la Lawrence of Arabia, Cahill knows no bounds in his pursuit of his always intriguing, always lively stories.
Cahill’s first published book was Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer. An account of the life of John Wayne Gacy, the book was written with the help of investigative reporter Russ Ewing, who had been granted the opportunity to interview and correspond with the notorious mass murderer for several years after Gacy’s arrest and imprisonment for the murder of thirty-three young men in Chicago.
After revealing the inner psyche of an extremely troubled man in Buried Dreams, Cahill now focused on his true calling—getting himself out of all sorts of crazy situations involving Mother Nature, and documenting them in articles and books. Jaguars Ripped My Flesh: Adventure Is a Risky Business and A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg feature collected essays previously published in Cahill’s “Out There” column in Outside over a seventeen-year period. Two more books of collected essays from the author’s twenty-years-worth of contributions to Outside would be published as Pecked to Death by Ducks and Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered.
The essays in Jaguars Ripped My Flesh are gleaned from Cahill’s early contributions to Outside. South America and Australia are among the continents that he traverses, meeting and mingling with everyday folk in situations that Cahill imbues with humor in the retelling. Readers will learn such useful information as how to find a good auto mechanic in Latin America and how to evaluate different suggestions for dealing with shark and bear attacks (first, be sure the person giving the advice has all his limbs).
In Pecked to Death by Ducks, readers find Cahill sea kayaking in the California Gulf, bungee jumping off a bridge in Bristol, England, with the dapperly dressed members of Britain’s Dangerous Sports Club, and exploring the newly discovered Lechugilla Cave outside Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered is one of Cahill’s recent collections of essays. In 1991 Cahill published a full-length, autobiographical work titled Road Fever: A High-Speed Travelogue. An account of the fifteen-thousand-mile, twenty-three-and-a-half-day marathon drive from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay.
For Cahill, even the excitement of his life up to that point had failed to provide him with some of the experiences he would encounter on this ultra-long road trip. Still, the author managed to keep his wits—and his life—and talked the whole trip into a tape re-corder, which he transcribed upon returning safely to his home-base in Montana.
In addition to his own works, Cahill has served as editor and contributor to Wild Places: Twenty Journeys into the North American Outdoors, published by Foghorn Press. He has also contributed to works by other authors, including an essay in The Literary Insomniac: Stories and Essays for Steepness Nights and the introduction to Broughton Coburn’s Everest: Mountain without Mercy, a publication of the National Geographic Society. His contributions to periodicals are many; magazines that contain Cahill’s byline include Discovery, Geo, Islands, National Geographic, and the San Francisco Examiner. While he continues to avoid what he terms “issue” books, Cahill’s respect and caring for the natural world underlies all his prose.
Nowadays he is an "Editor at Large" for the Outside magazine and continues to write his travel books.
(In his latest tour of the earth's remote, exotic, and dis...)
1993(Tales of Scrapes and Narrow Escapes; The Irresponsible Tr...)
2014(The author of A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Pecked to ...)
1987(In Pass the Butterworms, Cahill takes us to the steppes o...)
1997(Hold the Enlightenment takes Tim Cahill to sites as far-f...)
2002(Tim Cahill reports on the road trip to end all road trips...)
1991(In over 30 scathingly funny pieces, a diverse array of au...)
2000(Fearless and hell-bent on overcoming all obstacles in his...)
1989(A Walk in Yellowstone National Park; Lost in My Own Backy...)
2004
Quotations:
"A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles."
"I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure."
"You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel."
"You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write."
Cahill finds time and energy to fish in Guatemala, to search for giant clams battling their way back from extinction in Tonga, and to have a chat with diamond miners in Brazil.
Quotes from others about the person
[He is a writer who] appears to have personally visited every imaginable place on Earth ... where he has eaten whatever has been served ... and survived disastrous mishaps.” - Pam Johnson