David Grann Books in Order

If you want the best entry point: Killers of the Flower Moon
If you want exploration and obsession: The Lost City of Z → The White Darkness → The Wager
If you want shorter, stranger cases: The Devil and Sherlock Holmes → The Old Man and the Gun
If you want his biggest recent adventure: The Wager

David Grann was born in Manhattan and grew up in Connecticut, in a family where books and medicine both mattered. His father was a doctor, his mother was a publishing executive, and he was drawn early to stories, archives, and the odd little details that most people would skip past.

Long before his books were headed to the screen, he was the kind of reporter who would chase one loose clue for years.

At Connecticut College he studied international relations, with a focus on Latin America. After graduating, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and went to Mexico, where he researched politics and started doing freelance reporting. He has described that stretch, filing pieces from Puebla and riding to Mexico City to turn them in, as the moment he realized how much he loved reporting and research.

His path was not especially neat. Back in the United States, he taught seventh and eighth grade in Rhode Island for a year, earned a master's degree in international relations at the Fletcher School, then studied creative writing at Boston University, where he held a teaching fellowship. He later joined The Hill as a copy editor, moved into editing and column writing, spent time at The New Republic, and in 2003 found the place that suited him best when he became a staff writer at The New Yorker.

What clicked for him was using the tools of fiction, scene, suspense, structure, inside nonfiction that stayed faithful to the facts.

You can see that clearly in The Lost City of Z, his first book, which follows British explorer Percy Fawcett into the Amazon and into one of the great disappearance stories of the last century. Readers who like adventure often start there. The book moves like a quest, but it also shows a pattern that runs through much of Grann's work, an obsession that keeps widening until it becomes a bigger story about empire, myth, and what people want to believe.

That same pattern runs through The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, a collection of reported pieces about con artists, prison gangs, giant squid hunters, and a dead Sherlock Holmes expert. Then Killers of the Flower Moon turned his attention to the murders of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma, especially the attacks on Mollie Burkhart's family, and to the larger system of greed and racism that made those crimes possible. Many readers come to Grann for the mystery, but stay because he keeps the victims and the human cost in view. Both The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon were later adapted for film.

The White Darkness and The Wager show how far his interests stretch without really changing. One follows Henry Worsley's solo attempt to cross Antarctica, the other rebuilds an 18th-century shipwreck, mutiny, and court martial from clashing firsthand accounts. Again and again, Grann returns to hidden histories, extreme landscapes, unreliable narrators, and people pushed by ambition, fear, or belief farther than seems sensible.

He lives in New York with his wife and two children, and he still works slowly by magazine standards, often spending years on a single book. He travels when he can, digs through archives, and likes stories where the truth is buried under official versions, missing records, or someone else's self-serving tale. That mix of patience and narrative drive is what keeps his nonfiction so readable.