Michael Punke

Michael Punke is an American author, attorney and former diplomat born in Torrington, Wyoming, in 1964. He studied international relations at George Washington University and earned a law degree from Cornell University before working in international trade policy, the White House and the United States Senate. Punke later served as Deputy United States Trade Representative and as the United States ambassador to the World Trade Organization. His early experience as a living-history interpreter at Fort Laramie helped develop his interest in the nineteenth-century American frontier.

Punke is best known for The Revenant, a novel based on frontiersman Hugh Glass’s struggle for survival and revenge after being mauled by a bear and abandoned in 1823. The book became a number-one New York Times bestseller and inspired the Academy Award-winning film. His second novel, Ridgeline, depicts the violent conflict surrounding the establishment of Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming in 1866, presenting both United States Army and Lakota perspectives. Punke has also written the narrative histories Fire and Brimstone, about a catastrophic Montana mining disaster, and Last Stand, which examines the campaign to save the American bison and the emergence of the conservation movement.