McKay Jenkins
Photo by Katherine Hinkley

Born in 1963, McKay Jenkins is the author of The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe (2003). Meticulously researched, the book chronicles the Division’s two years of training in Colorado; its role in the recapture of Kiska, an Aleutian island occupied by the Japanese; and its critical role breaking the German Army’s Gothic Line in Italy’s Apennine Mountains in 1944. A former staff writer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Jenkins has also written The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone (2000), and The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (1999), and edited The Peter Matthiessen Reader (2000). He is completing a book about a murder in the Canadian Arctic. Jenkins teaches journalism and twentieth-century American literature at the University of Delaware.

These men were a combination of European panache, Rocky Mountain muscle, and East Coast intelligence: lumberjacks, alpine guides, college skiers, forest rangers, trappers. They formed a remarkably self-assured group of men that took its pride not from a region, such as the famed 36th (Texas) Infantry Division, but from a distinct subculture of outdoorsmen that to the public at large seemed to represent a kind of masculine ideal.

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