Peter Hessler

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Hessler is an American writer and a journalist. He is currently the Beijing Correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic. He has previously written for Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and other American newspapers and magazines. He is best known for his two books on China - River Town written about his two years experience as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in Fuling, China, and more recently “Oracle Bones” a collection of journalistic stories he wrote living in Beijing.

Peter Hessler grew up in Columbia, Missouri. His father was a professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri, and his mother teaches history at Columbia College. He became interested in literature and writing while in high school. He went on to study English and Creative Writing at Princeton University, and English language and literature in the University of Oxford. In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps, and was sent to Fuling, China to teach English at a local college where he spent the next two years. Since 1999, Peter Hessler has been living in Beijing as a freelance writer. As of 2006, he's working on another book about the rural villages and factories in China.

Peter Hessler's Chinese name is "何伟".

Although his stories are about ordinary people's lives in China, and are not political themed, his books are not available in China.