A Walk in the Woods
A Walk in the Woods is Bill Bryson's 1998 memoir of attempting the Appalachian Trail, the 2,200-mile footpath that runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Bryson, a Des Moines-born writer who had spent most of his adult life in England, had recently moved his family back to America, settled in New Hampshire, and discovered that the trail crossed the road behind his house. He decided, with very little preparation, to walk it. The unlikely companion who finally agreed to join him was Stephen Katz, an old high-school friend, recovering alcoholic, and badly out-of-shape Iowan who arrived at the airport with a duffel bag of Snickers bars and immediately began dropping things off the trail. Bryson uses their stumbling progress, and his eventual decision to stop trying to walk the whole thing, as a frame for warm, comic reflections on the trail's history, its wildlife, and the mid-century men and women who built it. The book has become a fixture of trail-town bookstores.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A travel writer decides he ought to hike the Appalachian Trail. An old, out-of-shape friend signs on. What follows is two thousand miles of bears, blisters, dive motels, and quiet wonder.
Yes. A Walk in the Woods is a 1997 memoir by Bill Bryson about attempting the Appalachian Trail with his out-of-shape friend Stephen Katz. Bryson did not complete the entire trail, but the events and people described are real, with names changed in some cases.
Yes. A 2015 film starring Robert Redford as Bryson and Nick Nolte as Katz adapted the memoir. The film aged the characters up significantly and was loosely based on the book, with mixed reviews.
A Walk in the Woods was written by Bill Bryson, published in 1997 by Goldmann.
A Walk in the Woods is 328 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Walk in the Woods takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
A Walk in the Woods is a standalone novel by Bill Bryson, not part of a series.
A Walk in the Woods is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
