The Walk

Now a major motion picture directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, an artist of the air re-creates his six-year plot to pull off an act of incomparable beauty and imagination.

More than a quarter century before September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center was immortalized by an act of unprecedented daring and beauty. In August 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit boldly—and illegally—fixed a rope between the tops of the still-young Twin Towers, a quarter mile off the ground. At daybreak, thousands of spectators gathered to watch in awe and adulation as he traversed the rope a full eight times in the course of an hour. In The Walk, Petit recounts the six years he spent preparing for this achievement, a tour de force of imagination and tenacity.

Petit’s achievement made headlines around the world. In this stunning book, Petit tells the dramatic story of this history-making walk, from conception and clandestine planning to the performance and its aftermath. It draws on Petit’s own journals, in which he sketched and scribbled everything from his budgets to his strategies for rigging a high wire between two of the most secure towers in the world. It is a fitting tribute to those lost-but-not-forgotten symbols of human aspiration—the Twin Towers.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Philippe Petit is the world’s most famous high-wire performer, making more than eighty high-wire walks around the world. He also street-juggles, lectures, and practices close-up magic. He is the subject of the award-winning documentary film Man on Wire. When he’s not traveling, Philippe shares his time between The Cathedral St. John the Divine in New York City and a small hideaway in the Catskills.

“By evoking his youthful passion for the World Trade Center, Petit brings the towers’ awesomeness back to life.”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Every time I watch Philippe Petit perform, my heart beats a mile a minute, and I wonder, ‘What is going through his mind and heart up there?’ Now I know. This book is as awe-inspiring as his accomplishments on the wire.”
—MILOŠ FORMAN

“Philippe Petit is an artist whose theater is the sky. In this absorbing book, he reveals himself to be equal parts Houdini, Nureyev, and da Vinci.”
—ROBIN WILLIAMS

“How good to remember that morning in 1974 when a young man gave New York a gift of astonishing, indelible beauty. How good that he has sat down now to give us this lively and often heart-stopping account of how he achieved his masterpiece.”
—PAUL AUSTER

“It was Philippe Petit who connected the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in an act of beauty and ecstasy. Now that an act of terror has destroyed them both, his book resurrects and reunites them, in sheer defiance of gravity.”
—WERNER HERZOG