An American adventurer's death in El Salvador

Joe Sanderson left his Midwestern hometown in his 20s with a backpack, a notepad and a dream of being a writer, writes The Times' Héctor Tobar.

Starting in the mid-1960s, he crossed the Pacific on a freighter, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and kept going, for two decades in all, traipsing across more than 60 countries. Everywhere he went, he kept a diary and wrote to Mom and Dad back home in Urbana, Ill. ... The diary and the hundreds of missives Sanderson wrote home tell an unlikely American adventure story. They chronicle a peripatetic Midwesterner who joked and charmed his way across five continents, and eventually fought against an army backed by his own government.

Click here to read Tobar's full dispatch on the life and times of Joe Sanderson.

For more on El Salvador, click here.

Image: Joe Sanderson, a native of Urbana, Ill., works in a rebel camp in El Salvador around 1981. Sanderson died in April 1982, one of only two Americans known to have died while in the ranks of that country's leftist guerrilla movement in the 1980s and '90s. Credit: Collection of the Museum of the Word and Image