American · b. 1947
Laurence Gonzales writes about people in the worst hour of their lives. Born in St. Louis in 1947 and raised in Houston and San Antonio before his family settled outside Chicago, he built a career in magazines — Rolling Stone, Playboy, National Geographic Adventure — and won two National Magazine Awards for reporting. The subject that made his name arrived from his own family: his father was flying a B-17 over Dusseldorf when a shell took off the wing, and he fell out of the sky and lived. Deep Survival (2003) turned that question into a book, pairing accident reports with the neuroscience of fear, and it has stayed in print for two decades. He returned to the material in Everyday Survival and Surviving Survival, and reconstructed the 1989 Sioux City crash of United Flight 232 interview by interview. He has also written novels, including Lucy, and teaches survival psychology to pilots, climbers and rescue crews.