Childhood and education
McCandless grew up in Annandale, Virginia, located in affluent Fairfax County. His father, Walt McCandless, worked for NASA as an antenna specialist. His mother, Wilhelmina "Billie" Johnson, was his father's secretary and later helped Walt establish and run a successful consulting company.
From early childhood, his teachers noticed that McCandless was unusually strong-willed. As he grew older, he coupled this with an intense idealism and physical endurance. In high school, he served as captain of the cross-country team, where he urged his teammates to treat running as a spiritual exercise in which they were "running against the forces of darkness....all the evil in the world, all the hatred."
He graduated from W.T. Woodson High School in 1986 and from Emory University in 1990, majoring in history and anthropology. His upper middle-class background and academic success masked a growing contempt for what he saw as the empty materialism of American society. "In his junior year he was offered membership in Phi Beta Kappa but declined on the basis that honors and titles are irrelevant," Krakauer reported in Into the Wild. The works of Jack London, Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau had a strong influence on McCandless, and he dreamed about leaving society for a Thoreau-like period of solitary contemplation.
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