Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like
Conover has spent his career embedding himself directly inside the worlds he writes about — riding freight trains with hoboes, crossing the border with undocumented migrants, working nearly a year as a real Sing Sing corrections officer. This list is for readers who want more of that specific method: journalists who don’t just interview a subject but become one, taking on the actual risk and role rather than observing from outside.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 authors · Immersive Journalism · Updated August 2026
George Orwell
Orwell deliberately chose to live in poverty — working exhausting kitchen shifts in Paris, tramping between London shelters — to write Down and Out in Paris and London, establishing the same commitment to lived experience over secondhand observation that defines Conover’s work decades later.
The clearest historical precursor to Conover’s method — Orwell’s insistence on actually experiencing destitution rather than reporting on it from outside is the direct ancestor of what Conover does with prisons and border crossings.
Jack London
London lived undercover in London’s East End slums in 1902 to write The People of the Abyss, sleeping in workhouses and on the streets — one of the earliest true works of undercover immersive journalism, predating Orwell by nearly three decades.
An even earlier precursor than Orwell — London’s willingness to live the actual conditions he was documenting is the same instinct Conover applies to modern American institutions.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich went undercover working a series of minimum-wage jobs for Nickel and Dimed, documenting the real difficulty of surviving on such wages from direct, lived experience rather than statistics.
The clearest contemporary American peer — both writers use undercover employment specifically as their method, taking on the actual job rather than shadowing someone who has it.
Gloria Steinem
Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 to expose the working conditions inside Playboy Clubs, one of the earliest and most famous examples of an American journalist assuming a role rather than reporting from outside it.
A foundational example of undercover role-assumption journalism, predating most of the genre’s later, more sustained practitioners.
John Carreyrou
Carreyrou’s relentless, source-by-source investigation into Theranos in Bad Blood shares Conover’s underlying conviction that getting close enough to a closed, secretive system is the only way to understand what’s actually happening inside it.
A more corporate, white-collar version of the same instinct — closeness to the subject as the only route to real understanding, applied to Silicon Valley fraud rather than a prison.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
LeBlanc spent over ten years embedded with two Bronx families for Random Family, sharing Conover’s commitment to sustained, close proximity over distant observation, even without physically assuming a role the way Conover does.
A different flavor of immersion — years of embedded closeness rather than role-assumption — but the same underlying refusal to report on a world without genuinely entering it.
Where to start if you loved Ted Conover
If you want the historical origin of this method, then read George Orwell.
Down and Out in Paris and London is the direct ancestor of Conover’s entire approach.
If you want the American undercover-employment peer, then read Barbara Ehrenreich.
Nickel and Dimed uses the same undercover-job method Conover applies to prisons and borders.
If you want the earliest known precursor, then read Jack London.
The People of the Abyss predates Orwell by nearly three decades using the same method.
If you want his own work first, then start with his books.
My complete guide to Ted Conover’s own books is the place to begin.
If you want more of this tradition, then keep exploring it.
My best investigative journalism books list has the natural successors.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Ted Conover
More from the shelf
