The Revenant is based on the story of real-life American frontiersman Hugh Glass and was the basis of two movies including the 2015 film that stars Leonardo DiCaprio who just won an Oscar for his role as the explorer who was left for dead after being mauled by a grizzly bear. Without weapons or supplies, Hugh didn’t die, but instead stumbled some 200 miles to safety. Then he went after the men who abandoned him.

The movie was adapted from The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge from Lovell, Wyoming born author Michael Punke, the son of a biology/chemistry teacher and a grade school teacher. He graduated from Torrington High School in 1982. Michael is very successful in the political world but was raised in the Wyoming wilderness and was resourceful enough to build his own Hawken Rifle from a kit at the age of 14. Michael’s brother related that fact in an interview with Maxim.com.

Maxim says the author can’t talk about the book or the movie.

“Michael is the Deputy United States Trade Representative and US Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He’s in a such a sensitive position that the State Department can’t let him talk to reporters. He has to leave that his friends and his brother.”

Younger brother Tim also says that Michael is a globe trotter but wants to be able to stay in the Missoula, Montana area because writers can live anywhere. You can read Michael’s other works Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917 and Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West

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