Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Flight of Passage | 1997 | Buy |
| If We Had Wings | 2001 | Buy |
| First Job | 2002 | Buy |
| Shane Comes Home | 2005 | Buy |
| The Oregon Trail | 2015 | Buy |
| Life on the Mississippi | 2022 | Buy |
Rinker Buck is an American journalist and author whose non-fiction books combine personal experience with American history. He grew up in a large family in New Jersey, where his father, a barnstorming pilot, introduced him to aviation at a young age. That background inspired his first book, Flight of Passage (1997), about a cross-country flight he and his brother made as teenagers in a rebuilt Piper Cub.
Buck worked as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer for years before returning to book-length non-fiction. The Oregon Trail (2015) became his breakthrough, telling the story of his 2,000-mile journey across the trail by mule-drawn covered wagon. The book was both a New York Times bestseller and a personal account of what the trail looked like in the 21st century, mixed with historical research on the original pioneers. He followed it with Life on the Mississippi (2022), in which he built a wooden flatboat and floated the Mississippi River from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, retracing a route used by settlers in the early 1800s.
His books share a common approach: Buck puts himself through a physically demanding historical recreation and uses the experience as a lens for exploring forgotten chapters of American life.