Robert Draper 9/25/13

Robert Draper is a freelance writer for several magazines. With past experience with Texas Monthly, GQ, and Austin Chronicle, he is now a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine, Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic. Draper considers himself a studier of “the human condition,” as he called it. His pieces range from profiles, to essays, to investigative works, and finally to human interest, where he discusses a lot about politics and travel. His resume includes profiles and researched articles on George W. Bush and Hunter S. Thompson. He’s written a book on Rolling Stone magazine entitled Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History next to several other books on unrelated topics. His accomplishments continue as he will have about 14 published stories by the end of this year.
Draper explained that writing helps him figure out and process how to tell a story while he’s writing.
His Rolling Stone book shows the true meaning of the magazine itself, which is still applicable even now. It’s easy to imagine that in the 1960s and ‘70s, Rolling Stone’s mission was to uncover true rock ‘n’ roll, but can the same be spoken about the magazine today? Draper says Rolling Stone still creates controversy and seizes the spotlight (i.e. the Boston bomber on the cover several months ago). Rolling Stone exists to, “legitimize rock ‘n’ roll as a subject matter to take seriously.”
It’s funny to think that the nitty gritty classic rock music was depicted to take seriously through means of articles, interviews, and research, but Draper knows what he’s talking about. There’s a business behind it all of course, and this is “how hippies became yuppies,” as Draper so truthfully put it.
That’s the thing that I liked most about Draper: truth. No matter what magazine he is writing for or what type of piece he’s writing, he positions himself in the seemingly perfect place. That, and perhaps luck kept him safe from kidnappers in Somalia while he was there for National Geographic.
In his interviews with George W. Bush, Draper noted that Bush seems “intellectually lazy,” but not to be confused with unintelligent. Bush just gets disengaged. When Draper said, “Bush’s vices and virtues are one and the same,” I felt that Draper truly positioned himself directly in between Republican and Democrat. His trick seeming to be to consider the interviewees as real people rather than expected faults and/or monsters.
One of my favorite things that Draper said was that he’s uncomfortable with caricatures. Even villains and crime-committees have a breaking point or reasoning behind their faults; so Draper breaks down the defensive wall to understand the person and to question why they seem like monsters?
Although Draper admitted to getting a lot of negative responses for him sympathizing with said “monsters” (such as the 23-year-old woman who threw her children off a cliff), I truly admire his ability to stance himself in the middle of good and bad, to make light out of dark, and to honestly depict the real human condition in everyday life.