Ted Conover Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Ted Conover
Ted Conover is a master of experience based narrative nonfiction. His book “Guarding Sing Sing” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Ted was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Denver, Colorado. He was a student at Hill Junior High School in Denver, where he gained some of his earliest journalism experiences.

Ted first started looking for ways to combine journalism and creative writing by penning articles for Torch, the Hill Junior high paper. For one of his articles, he interviewed Lloyd Haynes, an actor, with help from one fortuitous encounter in Aspen, Colorado during a family ski trip. The article earned him his first front page news feature and quite a bit of attention from classmates.

He went on to attend Denver’s George Washington High School and then went to Manual High School. This was after court-ordered desegregation resulted in school reassignments, which was a development that contributed to his early interests in research experiences which cross cultural, social, and geographical borders.

During high school and undergraduate summer breaks he worked for Colorado papers like the Lakewood Sentinel and Aurora Sentinel. His first paid journalism writing assignments were local stories about high school sports, real estate development, and the opening of an American Furniture Warehouse. He and a buddy rode bicycles from Seattle to New Jersey the summer before starting college in Massachusetts. For one personal essay class the following year, he described the final hour of this journey, his professor liked it and Ted pitched it to Bicycling! Magazine. “Finishing”, the resulting article, was his first freelance sale.

Ted is a graduate of Amherst College obtaining his bachelor’s in anthropology, and is a former Marshall Scholar. He’s taught graduate courses in the New York University Literary Reportage concentration, and undergrad courses on the journalism of empathy and undercover reporting.

He is a distinguished writer-in-residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.

Ted, during his undergrad years, was trained in this academic writing style which uses third person perspective, however he since developed his own first person writing technique which is suitable to immersive research and narrative non fiction.

Writers that have inspired him include John Steinbeck, Jack London, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, Bruce Chatwin, Stanley Booth, Anne Tyler, Tom Wolfe, and Anne Fadiman.

“Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes” is a non-fiction book that was released in 1984. In Ted’s first book, he enters into a segment of humanity just outside of society and reports back on this world that few of us would ever choose to enter yet about which we’re all curious.

Hoboes had fascinated Ted, yet he’d only ever encountered them in folk songs and literature. So, he figured he’d take one year off and ride the rails. Equipped with rummage-store clothing, a bedroll, and some other belongings, he hops this freight train in St. Louis, becoming a tramp so that he can learn their peculiar culture.

The men and women that he meets along the way are by turns mistrusting and generous, desperate and resourceful, profoundly cynical and philosophical. And the narrative that he creates of these travels with them is both moving and unforgettable.

“Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing” is a non-fiction book that was released in 1999. This is the story about Ted’s rookie year spent as a guard at Sing Sing. It is a nerve-wracking account of his passage into this storied prison and the culture of the guards there, both fresh faced “newjacks” just like Ted and the brutally hardened veterans. While struggling to be a good officer, he angers inmates, works to balance toughness with decency, and dodges blows; he even participates in prison rituals (strip frisks cell “extractions”, cell searches) all which exact a toll on officers and inmates alike.

The story starts with the corrections academy and it concludes with the smoke and flames of New Year’s Eve on Ted’s floor of the notorious B-Block. Ted, along the way, recounts the history of Sing Sing, from draconian early punishment, to its fame as the citadel of capital punishment, to the present status it has as New York State’s “bottom of the barrel” prison.

This is a book sure to become a landmark of American journalism, the definitive presentation of the impasse between needing to imprison criminals and the dehumanization of guards and inmates, which almost inevitably takes place behind bars.

“Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2022. A passage through an America lived off the grid and wild.

In May of 2017, Ted went to Colorado so that he could explore firsthand the rural way of life which is about living cheaply, on your own land, and staying clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the huge San Luis Valley made this possible. Five acre lots on the high prairie can be had for just five thousand bucks, sometimes even less. However along with stunning views and independence come some fierce winds, neighbors with criminal pasts, and minimal medical and government services.

Ted volunteered for this local group attempting to prevent homelessness during the bitter winters. He encountered an unexpected diversity: families homeschooling, people of color, veterans with PTSD, addicts old and young, gay people, gun lovers, pot lovers, people with social anxiety. Most of them spurning charity and aiming (and sometimes failing) to be self-sufficient. And more than just a few predicting that they will be the last ones standing once society collapses.

Ted bought five acres of his own and immersed himself for parts of five years in the often contentious culture of the far margins. He discovered many that dislike the government yet depend on its subsidies; who love having their own space yet nevertheless find themselves being in one another’s business; generous yet wary of thieves; who appreciate beauty yet endure squalor. In their struggles to get along and survive, they tell us all about an America that is riven by difference where the edges speak more and more loudly to the mainstream.