Wade Davis

Wade Davis (born 1953) is a Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist whose work at the intersection of science, culture, and adventure writing has produced some of the most vivid nonfiction of the past four decades. A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, he has spent his career documenting the world’s endangered cultures and ecosystems with a combination of scientific rigor and literary ambition that sets him apart from both academic anthropology and conventional travel writing.

Life and Career

Davis was born in West Vancouver, British Columbia. He studied anthropology and biology at Harvard University, where he was a student of the legendary ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes — a relationship that would shape his entire career. His doctoral work took him to Haiti, the Amazon, and the Andes, and his first book, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), drew on his Haitian research.

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985, Simon & Schuster) investigated the ethnobotanical basis of Haitian zombification — the cultural and pharmacological process by which certain Vodou practitioners appeared to create “zombies.” The book was a bestseller and was adapted into a Wes Craven film (1988), though Davis has noted that the film bore little resemblance to his book. The scientific claims were controversial — some pharmacologists disputed his analysis of the zombie powder — but the book’s vivid account of Haitian religious culture was widely praised.

One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (1996) is arguably Davis’s finest work — a dual narrative that interweaves the story of Schultes’s botanical expeditions in the Amazon during the 1940s with Davis’s own Amazonian fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction: part biography, part travelogue, part botanical encyclopedia, part elegy for disappearing peoples and ecosystems.

The Wayfinders and Into the Silence

Light at the Edge of the World (2001) explored threatened cultures across four regions. The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (2009, based on his Massey Lectures) is his most widely read argument for cultural preservation — a passionate, erudite case for the ethnosphere (a term he coined to describe the sum total of all human cultural knowledge and practice) as being as endangered and as important as the biosphere.

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (2011) was his most ambitious historical work — a 600-page account of the 1921–1924 British Everest expeditions that argues the climbers were motivated as much by the trauma of World War I as by mountaineering ambition. The book won the Samuel Johnson Prize (now the Baillie Gifford Prize) for nonfiction.

Magdalena: River of Dreams (2020) was a portrait of Colombia through the lens of its great river.

Key Works

• The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985)
• One River (1996)
• The Wayfinders (2009)
• Into the Silence (2011)

Collecting Davis

The Serpent and the Rainbow first edition (Simon & Schuster, 1985) signed brings $75–$200. One River first edition (Simon & Schuster, 1996) signed is $50–$150. Into the Silence (Knopf, 2011) signed is $40–$100. Davis is an active lecturer and signs at events worldwide. His books are published by major houses with moderate print runs. First editions in fine condition are available at reasonable prices, and his work’s combination of literary quality, scientific substance, and adventure-narrative appeal gives it broad collector interest.