David Quammen is an author and journalist whose 18 books include Breathless (2022), The Tangled Tree (2018), Spillover (2012), The Song of the Dodo (1996), and most recently, The Heartbeat of the Wild (2023). Though he began his career as a novelist (To Walk the Line, 1970, and three other works of fiction), in recent decades he has written only nonfiction, focused mainly on science, the history of science, and the relationships of humans to landscape and biological diversity.