As his stories have grown in detail and scope, so too have the films that have been adapted from them. In his equally impressive run as an author, his books The Lost City of Z, Killers of the Flower Moon, and most recently, The Wager, have risen to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and brought his excellent work to the eyes of the masses. In his two-decade-long post as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Grann has tackled incredible deceptions, curious crimes, and grueling voyages with literary aplomb. The bespectacled 56-year-old dad has long been a “ storyteller’s storyteller,” appealing to a subset of readers who cherish the classics and nerd out on bibliographies.

It’s this extraordinary ability to connect the dots across nearly 300 years of history-to sneak modern-day allegories into intricate adventure tales-that has vaulted Grann’s work from bookshelves to silver screens. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. And I was like: This 18th-century story is also a weird parable for our times.” Then I would come home and I’d be reading about the banning of certain history books. “There were competing narratives and there were even allegations of fake journals.

“It was disinformation and misinformation,” he said. Rather, it was how the ship’s surviving castaways later described those events to the masses, publishing conflicting accounts of what happened to save themselves from being hanged. It was not the document’s descriptions of typhoons, shipwreck, or mutinies, however captivating, that convinced Grann the story of The Wager was worth resurrecting. And somehow I found myself in the 18th century.”Ī fan of both Herman Melville and long-forgotten archives, Grann landed on the journals of a 16-year-old midshipman who was stranded with his crew members on an island off the coast of Patagonia. I suddenly was trying to find a way to get at some of those scenes. “These battles over truth and so-called fake news.

“I was following the news each day,” Grann told me over the phone last month.

But ask Grann how he landed on the idea for the book and he’ll say it all began with the headlines of 2017. After all, this was the Age of Sail, a time when navigating a ship involved a concerning amount of guesswork, and the best solution for a serious injury was often amputation. Like many of Grann’s stories, it’s a high-stakes quest that unravels in a setting that feels entirely divorced from modern society. David Grann’s latest nonfiction epic, The Wager, follows a heaving imperial British warship of the same name as it sets out in 1740 on a perilous mission in search of Spanish treasure.

David grann the wager