Quammen's articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and other periodicals.

The collection consists of approximately 63 boxes of publicly available literary production, artifacts, maps, and other papers dated from 1856–2014.

[6] Later in 1999, Quammen began to write a series of three stories following J. Michael Fay's 2000-mile hike through Central Africa for National Geographic.

Quammen continued working with National Geographic, holding a Contributing Writer position, producing cover stories like "Was Darwin Wrong?"

"[6] From 2007 to 2009, Quammen was employed as the Wallace Stegner Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

[11] The Song of the Dodo (Scribner, 1996), a study of the bird's extinction won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing.