St. Martin’s Press

St. Martin’s Press is the publisher of The Climb, the book Anatoli Boukreev coauthored with G. Weston DeWalt about the 1996 Everest disaster. Its role extended beyond publication: it arranged a demanding book tour, considered complaints about the book’s accuracy, and worked with DeWalt to revise wording after Jane Bromet supplied a later recollection. The record presents the press as both a publishing institution and a participant in the contested process by which an account of the disaster was edited, challenged, and defended.

Publication and Promotion

In late October 1997, St. Martin’s Press published The Climb. Almost immediately, the publisher arranged a tour for Boukreev and DeWalt. Their days began at six in the morning and ran until midnight; the schedule frustrated Boukreev because it interfered with his training, though he accepted the work without frequent complaint. The tour carried the book into public discussion at a moment when the disaster and competing accounts of it remained intensely debated.

The press’s role in the book’s public life also appears in the dispute over how much of Boukreev’s response could fit magazine formats. Brad Wetzler, a senior editor at Outside, offered to reduce Boukreev’s letter to 400 words for the magazine’s “Letters” section. On a later approach, Wetzler offered 350 words and proposed editing the letter to sharpen its arguments and make it more forceful. Boukreev declined both offers, maintaining that his response to Jon Krakauer’s allegations could not be reduced to sound bites. These exchanges concern Outside rather than St. Martin’s directly, but they illuminate the broader editorial pressures surrounding the book’s defense and the limits Boukreev placed on abridging it.

Editorial Review and Dispute

In Krakauer’s postscript to the illustrated edition of Into Thin Air, he challenged The Climb’s reliability by describing alleged errors he had brought to St. Martin’s Press’s attention. DeWalt’s account says that the press and he carefully considered Krakauer’s specific complaints and believed the mass-market paperback, published in July 1998, had responsibly addressed them. DeWalt disputed the characterization of the complaints as straightforward errors, arguing that many were matters with which Krakauer took issue. The disagreement therefore concerned not only individual details but also what counted as an error and how editorial revision should answer a critic’s objections.

The dispute also involved which witnesses and sources the book included. Krakauer criticized Boukreev and DeWalt for not interviewing certain participants, including Mike Groom of Adventure Consultants. DeWalt answered that Boukreev had not intended The Climb as a definitive explanation of the disaster: Boukreev rejected the ambition to produce a comprehensive account, which he felt would amount to playing God, and wanted the book to remain a personal account. The press’s review of Krakauer’s complaints thus took place alongside a deeper disagreement over the book’s intended scope and the standards by which its omissions should be judged.

Revisions and New Information

A particularly concrete editorial decision arose from Bromet’s October 8, 1997, letter, which arrived after The Climb had been printed and shipped. She objected to bracketed wording that made Fischer’s conversation with her sound as though it had occurred shortly before the final assault on May 10, 1996. In that letter, she recalled that she had left Everest Base Camp weeks before the climb, but did not give an exact date for her departure or for the conversation.

After considering this later recollection, St. Martin’s Press and DeWalt decided to remove the bracketed phrase “the final assault on May 10, 1996” and replace it with wording that better represented Bromet’s situation as she now described it. The correction was complicated by the absence of a precise date in her letter. DeWalt then found a sentence already in The Climb indicating that Bromet had returned to Seattle by the early morning of April 23 in Nepal, or late afternoon of April 22 in Seattle. He recognized that he had overlooked this reference while preparing the manuscript. The episode shows the press responding to a post-publication challenge while the authors reassessed how the book’s chronology had been established.

Editorial Standards and Significance

St. Martin’s Press also figures in DeWalt’s defense of the book’s handling of fact-checking. In answering Krakauer’s claim that Outside had checked certain details with Boukreev before publishing, DeWalt pointed to photographs sent to Outside before publication that he said showed Boukreev adequately dressed on summit day. This argument belongs to the wider dispute over the magazine article and its verification, rather than establishing an independent action by St. Martin’s; nevertheless, it helps explain why editorial scrutiny and the publisher’s paperback revisions became part of the controversy.

The publisher’s work, as described in the account, involved several different stages: bringing The Climb to market, promoting it through a tour, reviewing objections for a paperback edition, and agreeing to revise a passage when Bromet’s later letter altered the available account of timing. Those stages do not settle the competing claims about the Everest disaster. Instead, they show how the book’s narrative continued to be shaped and contested after publication, as editorial decisions became part of the public argument over evidence, chronology, and the proper limits of a personal account.