Ted Conover

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Conover first began looking for ways to combine creative writing and journalism by writing articles for the Hill Junior High newspaper, Torch. For one Torch article, he interviewed actor Lloyd Haynes by means of a fortuitous encounter in Aspen, Colorado during a family ski trip. This article earned Conover his first front-page news feature and much attention from his classmates. In high school and during undergraduate summer breaks Conover worked for Colorado newspapers such as the Aurora Sentinel and the Lakewood Sentinel. His first paid journalism writing assignments were local stories on high school sports, real estate development, and the opening of an American Furniture Warehouse. He and a friend rode bicycles from Seattle to New Jersey the summer before they began college in Massachusetts. For a personal essay class the next year, he described the final hour of that journey; the professor liked it and Conover pitched it to Bicycling! Magazine. The resulting article, "Finishing," was his first freelance sale, according to Conover.

Conover took a magazine internship at U.S. News & World Report during his junior year at Amherst College, which led him to think he "might have a place in that profession." He credits anthropology courses he took at Amherst with adding rigor and depth to both his thinking and his journalistic writing. His senior thesis, "Between Freedom and Poverty: Railroad Tramps of the American West," was an ethnography of railroad hobos. He published an article about this research in the Amherst student journal In Other Words. The article was reprinted in the Amherst alumni magazine, where it caught the attention of a wire service reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts who then interviewed Conover about the article. The reporter’s article led to appearances on The Today Show and National Public Radio. This publicity enabled Conover to catch the attention of New York literary agent Sterling Lord, who had helped launch the career of Jack Kerouac. Lord represented Conover for his first book, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes, which was based on Conover’s undergraduate research.

Conover spent two years at Cambridge University after writing Rolling Nowhere. Building on his encounters while riding the rails with Mexican undocumented immigrants whom he described as "the true modern-day incarnation of the classic American hobo," Conover next spent a year traveling with Mexican migrants as research for what would become his 1987 book Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants. During this year, he lived in a "feeder" valley in the Mexican state of Querétaro, spent time in Arizona, Idaho, California, and Florida, and crossed the US-Mexico border three times.

Conover next applied his participatory research method in the setting of a wealthy subculture in the mining-town-turned-lifestyle-capital of Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as a driver for the Mellow Yellow Taxi Company, for a catering company, and as a reporter for the Aspen Times. His experiences were the basis for his 1991 book Whiteout: Lost in Aspen.

He moved to the East Coast in the 1990s and began writing for national publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In the mid-1990s, amidst skyrocketing rates of incarceration, he applied for work as a New York State corrections officer. He sought this position after the New York State Department of Corrections denied his request to shadow the department's employees in a journalistic role. Hired in 1997, Conover went through seven weeks of corrections officer training in Albany, New York and then spent nearly a year working at Sing Sing prison in various entry-level custody posts throughout the prison. After resigning, Conover presented his research and observations in an article for The New Yorker and in his 2000 book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Newjack was awarded the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2001 Journalism General Nonfiction category of the Pulitzer Prize. The book was initially banned by the New York State Department of Corrections and could be confiscated from prisoner mail, but was later allowed on the condition that pages considered a threat to security be redacted prior to prisoners receiving the book. As of 2019, Newjack was still banned in Arizona, Kansas, and Missouri state prisons.

Conover’s work for his next book—his 2011 The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World—focused on a central theme as observed across multiple continents: the role of roads and connectedness in shaping different aspects of human society. His research for this book took him to the Andes, East Africa and West Africa, the Middle East, China, and the Himalayas.

Conover has explored additional subcultures and topics in articles for magazines such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, T Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Outside, Travel + Leisure, Smithsonian Magazine, and 5280. During the autumn of 2012, Conover worked as a United States Department of Agriculture inspector and wrote about his beef inspection work at the Cargill Meat Solutions plant in Schuyler, Nebraska in the May 2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine. In August 2019 Harper’s also published his long-form journalism piece "The Last Frontier: Homesteaders on the Margins of America." Written in his signature style, it is a first-person account of life among people living off-grid in Colorado's expansive San Luis Valley.

In 2016 Conover published his book Immersion: A Writer's Guide To Going Deep as part of the University of Chicago Press Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing series. In this book he focuses on the approach to writing he has developed over three decades of his career, touching on the practical and ethical challenges of immersive reporting, and citing examples from his own work and that of other writers such as Sebastian Junger, Anne Fadiman, Susan Orlean, and Jon Krakauer.

Conover has performed several times on stage for The Moth and has been interviewed in podcasts and other forums. He sits on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common based at Amherst College.

Conover expresses commitment to academic and journalistic rigor but also embraces some degree of experimentation in nonfiction writing, stating that "[l]iterature stays alive when it’s open to new approaches." His research methods position him as an active participant within a subculture of interest. He has been called a "participatory journalist, living as closely as possible the lives of the people he was writing about." In 2010, he told The Denver Post:

His first experiment with this melding of anthropological and journalistic methods began in 1980, when he rode freight railroads across the western United States with railroad tramps, or hobos, as research for the senior thesis that would become his first book. Through this experience Conover discovered that immersive research enables a writer to discover "a whole new set of questions" by which to organize life and priorities, adding more depth and authenticity to the writing that is produced.

Conover’s books of narrative nonfiction have typically been studies of little-known social groups and often provide some historical and sociological context. For example, in Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing Conover intersperses ethnographic and memoir-style observations from his work at Sing Sing prison with anecdotes of early American penological history to elucidate the social forces that have shaped American prisons over time. Conover states he is "proud that Newjack found readers both among prison reform advocates and corrections officers," illustrating his interest in creating works of writing that appeal to readers and experts from diverse backgrounds.

During his undergraduate years Conover was trained in an academic writing style that uses the third-person point of view, but he has since developed a first-person writing technique that is suitable to immersive research and narrative nonfiction. Authors who have inspired Conover include Walt Whitman, Jack London, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Stanley Booth, Bruce Chatwin, Anne Tyler, Anne Fadiman, and Tom Wolfe.

Conover’s technique blends ethnography, journalism, and memoir, and builds upon the 1960s and 70s innovations of New Journalism. According to Kutztown University of Pennsylvania English professor Patrick Walters, Conover "navigates the fuzzy border between journalism and memoir, forging his own brand of immersion with a delicate balance of the two, while mostly letting the subjects speak for themselves." Conover emphasizes the difference between immersion research and undercover investigation work, viewing himself as a practitioner of the former more than the latter.

Conover has been credited with establishing the modern standards for literary and immersion journalism. He advocates applying multidisciplinary research and narrative techniques to uncover the complexities of individual experience. A description of a Journalism of Empathy course taught by Conover at New York University reads:

In his 2016 book Immersion: A Writer’s Guide to Going Deep Conover discusses balancing the truth-seeking duties of a reporter with the more personalized narrative styles of memoir and empathetic journalism. In an interview with Creative Nonfiction magazine, Conover also explained how he balances journalistic integrity with fairness and sensitivity to those with whom he interacts while doing immersion research:

As Conover’s name has become more well-known, he has sometimes had to adapt his immersion research technique, since he lacks the anonymity he had earlier in his career.

Conover began teaching writing at summer sessions including the Aspen Summer Words Festival, Writers at Work, the Santa Fe Writers Conference, the Sun Valley Writers Conference, and the Sarah Lawrence Summer Seminar for Writers. He served on the nonfiction faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference nine times between 1989–2015, and taught at Bread Loaf in Sicily in 2017.In 2005 he took a position as Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. In 2013 he was named Associated Professor and in 2017 Full Professor. Conover served as the Institute’s director from 2018–2021. He has taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses including "Ethnography for Journalists," "Longform Narrative," "Undercover Reporting," "The Journalism of Empathy," and "Varieties of the First Person." In 2021 he received the Golden Dozen teaching award from NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Conover has also taught courses for the University of Oregon and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Although Conover teaches formal writing courses, he also encourages aspiring writers to "spend time away from the academy." He acknowledges limits to what can be taught in a classroom setting:

Conover identifies narrative structure and effective use of digression as two of the more challenging concepts to teach students.

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