Born in 1951 in Des Moines, Iowa, Bill Bryson holds dual American and British citizenship but has lived in England most of his adult life. Bryson first visited England in 1973 and was married there two years later, but the couple moved to the US in 1975 so that he could complete his education at Drake University. The couple moved back to England in 1977, where he began his career as a journalist and later an author. He has authored multiple books, several of which were bestsellers, focusing primarily on the subjects of travel, language, and popular science. Shortly before he began writing A Walk in the Woods in the mid-1990s, Bryson and his family moved back to the US, this time to Hanover, New Hampshire, where Bryson learned how close they lived to the Appalachian Trail and the idea struck him to attempt to hike it all. This book became a long-standing bestseller and inspired a sharp increase in people interested in hiking the AT.

Stephen Katz, whose full name is a pseudonym for Matt Angerer, is one of the two primary figures in A Walk in the Woods. Bryson and Katz grew up together in Iowa and were hiking companions in the early 1970s around Europe, which became the basis for Bryson’s 1991 book, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe.