Alexander Shoumatoff (born November 4, 1946) is a journalist and author who was Vanity Fair Magazine's senior-most contributing editor from 1986 to 2015, and a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1978 to 1987.

Shoumatoff covered international dictators in South America and Africa, nearly all major political candidates in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s for Vanity Fair, often before they chose to run for office, including John Kerry, Donald Trump, Bill Weld, Robert Kennedy Jr., Al Gore, and many more.

[6] When he was 16, impressed by the recordings of South Carolina bluesman Pink Anderson, he bought a guitar and went to the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, New York, where Bob Dylan got his break.

[7] Shoumatoff was admitted to Harvard University in 1964, as a sophomore where he studied poetry writing with Robert Lowell in a class that included fellow literary journalist Tracy Kidder.

[13] His paternal grandfather, Leo Shoumatoff, was the business manager of Igor Sikorsky's aircraft company who developed the first passenger airplane, The Pan Am Clipper, and the helicopter.

[14] After a stint at The Washington Post as a night police reporter, and with a draft classification of I-A, he enlisted into a Marine Corps reserve intelligence unit that trained him to be parachuted behind the Iron Curtain to melt into the local population.

In 1969, rather than returning to The Washington Post to become their Moscow correspondent under editor Ben Bradlee, Shoumatoff chose to "drop out" with his girlfriend and they moved to an old farm in New Hampshire.

Breaking up with his girlfriend that fall, he drifted to northern California, spending time at a succession of communes and playing music around bonfires and writing more songs.

There, he sold his profile of Gary Davis to Rolling Stone and got a song-writing contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Doc Watson, and others.

The marriage lasted only two years and Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York, left for the Amazon Rainforest.

Returning to Mount Kisco with a Brazilian wife, the Westchester book was excerpted by The New Yorker and he joined their staff in 1978, and had an office across the hall from naturalist Bill McKibben.

[19] By then, Shoumatoff was considered a rising literary star in New York, his associates included George Plimpton, and he shared a birthday party with singer Art Garfunkle in 1984.

Shawn encouraged his writers to pursue their interests in exhaustive detail,[20] a practice used to provide comprehensive reporting about often little-known but fascinating and important subjects, and to fill the demand of magazine's weekly print pages.

[21] His associates and fellow contributing editors at the magazine included Christopher Hitchens, James Wolcott, Carl Bernstein, Sebastian Junger, and many other of the top writers in America and Britain.

"[citation needed], In 2001, Shoumatoff started a web site, Dispatches From The Vanishing World, with his son Andre, to strengthened his focus on the environment and an interest in creating a written record of these places and/or cultures and species.