Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 20 books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Men Explain Things to Me, Orwell’s Roses , and Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power. Solnit experienced a troubled childhood in California. She skipped high school and attended an alternative junior high that allowed her the opportunity to obtain her GED in the 10th grade. She immediately enrolled in junior college and expanded her mind through education and travel. At 17 years old, Solnit moved to Paris before returning to finish a Bachelor of Arts at San Francisco State University and a Master of Arts in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. These early acts of self-discovery anticipate A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a book that argues for the value of disorientation in personal and intellectual life.

Throughout her writing career, Solnit has published works that stretch the boundaries of nonfiction. Wanderlust (a cultural history of walking), Savage Dreams (on Yosemite and the Nevada Test Site), and River of Shadows (on the birth of moving images), among others. River of Shadows won the National Book Critics Circle Award and other major prizes in 2004. Solnit later became widely known for her essay collection Men Explain Things to Me and the disaster history A Paradise Built in Hell. Her broad portfolio reveals her openness to new topics and new ways of thinking.

Solnit’s path to A Field Guide to Getting Lost began in the Bay Area punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although she was not a musician, Solnit keenly felt the disenfranchisement and wandering that were central to the movement. After completing River of Shadows, Solnit felt burned out. She wanted a new project that would not tie her to a deadline and allow her to explore (Sorkin, Mark. “Lose Yourself.” Salon). Unlike her other books, A Field Guide to Getting Lost allowed Solnit to step away from the linear narratives of her earlier works for a looser, more playful structure. In doing so, Solnit embraced the possibility of failure. She felt that by abandoning the formalized structure of her previous writing, she was opening herself up to the possibility of creating something that did not work. For Solnit, this felt like freedom. That risk, the freedom to fail, was part of the project’s ethos: A Field Guide to Getting Lost champions slowness, ambiguity, and the unknown. However, Solnit did not fail. The work was met with great critical acclaim. Reviewers emphasized the creativity of the book’s structure and its philosophical stakes.

Since the book’s publication, Solnit has continued her work as a public intellectual and activist. She writes widely for newspapers and magazines, publishes books across forms, and collaborates with artists and organizers. In 2018, she won the Kirkus Prize for Call Them by Their True Names. In 2019, she received the Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. Solnit’s recent work for The Guardian explores technology, attention, and climate change. The wide range of her later works reveals how Solnit continues to embrace disorientation and the new.