Ted Conover

Ted Conover (born January 17, 1958) is an American author and journalist who has been called a "master of immersion" and "master of experience-based narrative nonfiction."

A graduate of Amherst College and a former Marshall Scholar, he is also a professor and past director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.

He teaches graduate courses in the New York University Literary Reportage concentration, as well as undergraduate courses on the "journalism of empathy" and undercover reporting.

Ted Conover was born in Okinawa, Japan and raised in Denver, Colorado.

He was a student at Hill Junior High School in Denver, where he gained his earliest journalism experiences.

He went on to attend Denver's George Washington High School and then enrolled at Manual High School after court-ordered desegregation resulted in school reassignments—a development that contributed to his early interests in research experiences that cross social, cultural, and geographical borders (see Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver).

Conover finished high school in 1976 and went on to graduate summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Amherst College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

He was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University from 1982 to 1984 and received an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 2001.

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.

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.

His experiences were the basis for his 1991 book Whiteout: Lost in Aspen.

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.

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.

As of 2019, Newjack was still banned in Arizona, Kansas, and Missouri state prisons.