Rinker Buck Books in Order

If you want the classic starting point: Flight of Passage → The Oregon Trail
If you want a big American journey: The Oregon Trail → Life on the Mississippi
If you love aviation and flight history: Flight of Passage → If We Had Wings
If you want Buck the reporter: First Job → Shane Comes Home

Rinker Buck was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1950 and grew up in northern New Jersey in a family so large and noisy that ordinary life probably never had much of a chance. He was one of eleven children, and his father, Tom Buck, was a former barnstorming pilot and magazine publisher who filled the house with stories, schemes, horses, planes, and very little interest in staying small.

Adventure was part of the household routine.

The family story most readers know begins in 1966, when Buck was fifteen and his older brother Kernahan was seventeen. The two rebuilt a worn 1948 Piper Cub and flew it from New Jersey to California, navigating without a radio and becoming the youngest duo to make a coast-to-coast flight. Buck turned that experience, and the knotty feelings around trying to prove something to their father, into Flight of Passage, a memoir readers still love for its speed, humor, and family tension.

Writing came by way of reporting. After Bowdoin College, Buck spent time traveling on his motorcycle, saw that the Berkshire Eagle had just won a Pulitzer Prize, stopped by the newsroom, and, by his own telling, more or less blundered into a job interview. He started with obituaries and weather stories in 1973, which is about as practical an apprenticeship as a writer can get.

That accidental stop at a newspaper office changed his life.

Buck went on to work at the Hartford Courant and write for national magazines that included New York, Life, Adweek, and Vanity Fair. His journalism won major awards, but what matters most on the page is the reporter's habit of looking twice, then asking one more question. You can see that especially in First Job, his warm, rueful memoir of learning the newspaper trade, and in Shane Comes Home, his close account of Marine Lieutenant Shane Childers and the grief that follows his death in Iraq.

He has always been drawn to subjects that move, literally. If We Had Wings widens his early love of flying into a compact history of aviation, stretching from dreamers and early inventors to the space age. Even when Buck is writing history, he tends to look for the machines, the weather, the bad luck, and the ordinary people inside the big national story.

The Oregon Trail takes that instinct to full scale. For that book, Buck and his brother Nick crossed the old trail in a covered wagon pulled by mules, a stunt that could easily have become a gimmick in the wrong hands. Instead it became a big, funny, sometimes bruising travel narrative, and also a serious look at the trail, the settlers who used it, and the Native people whose world it cut through. The book became a number one New York Times bestseller and won the PEN New England Award.

History, for Buck, works best when it has dust on it.

He took a similar approach in Life on the Mississippi, building a wooden flatboat and taking it down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers toward New Orleans while digging into the nearly forgotten flatboat era that helped build the early American economy. Readers tend to come to Buck for adventure, but they stay for the side roads: sibling friction, fathers and sons, oddballs, breakdowns, and the feeling that the country looks different when you slow down enough to notice it. Recent profiles show that Buck still flies for recreation, which feels exactly right. His books keep returning to the same question in different forms: what do people learn about themselves when they leave comfort behind and try something difficult, old-fashioned, and a little unreasonable?