Hillary, << HIHL uh ree, >> Sir Edmund Percival (1919-2008), a New Zealand mountain climber, became one of the first two men to reach the top of Mount Everest and return. On May 29, 1953, he and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa tribesman from Nepal, reached the summit, which at the time was thought to be 29,002 feet (8,840 meters). Queen Elizabeth II knighted Hillary for the achievement. See Mount Everest .
Hillary made his first five expeditions on Himalayan peaks after World War II. He climbed part of the way up Everest in 1951 and 1952. He wrote High Adventure (1955), an account of the 1953 climb. In 1957 and 1958, he blazed a trail from McMurdo Sound to the South Pole for Sir Vivian Fuchs’s transantarctic expedition (see Antarctica (The International Geophysical Year)).
In 1960, Hillary headed an expedition, which was sponsored by World Book, to climb 27,824-foot (8,481-meter) Mount Makalu I. The expedition tested the ability of human beings to live without oxygen at high altitudes. The climbers also searched for but did not find evidence of the Yeti, a hairy beast said to live in the Himalaya and other mountainous areas of central and northeastern Asia. With Desmond Doig, Hillary wrote High in the Thin Cold Air (1962) about this climb (see Yeti). 
Hillary was born on July 20, 1919, in Auckland, New Zealand. His first job was beekeeping. Following his successful ascent of Mount Everest, Hillary spent much of the rest of his life supporting environmental causes and sponsoring humanitarian work on the behalf of the Nepalese people, such as building clinics, hospitals, and schools throughout Nepal. Hillary died on Jan. 11, 2008.
