John McPhee

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For the former Tasmanian premier, see John McPhee (Australian politician).

Image:McPheeAnnals.JPG John Angus McPhee (born March 8, 1931) is a writer widely considered one of the pioneers of literary non-fiction. Like Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, he helped kickstart the "new journalism" which, in the 1960s, revolutionalized nonfiction by incorporating techniques from novels and other forms of fiction. McPhee avoided the attention-grabbing streams of consciousness of Wolfe and Thompson, but his detailed description of characters, insatiable appetite for details, and masterful style make his writing lively, readable, and personal, even when it focuses on obscure or difficult topics.

McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of the Princeton University team physician, Dr. Harry McPhee. John McPhee was educated at Deerfield Academy, Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to a long association with The New Yorker beginning in 1965 and continuing to the present. Many of his twenty-nine books include material originally written for that magazine.

He has received many literary honors, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1999, awarded for Annals of the Former World. In 1978 McPhee received a Litt.D. from Bates College.

McPhee's subjects, reflecting his personal interests, are highly eclectic. He has written pieces on dirigibles, the United States Merchant Marine (Looking for a Ship), farmers' markets (Giving Good Weight), the shifting flow of the Mississippi River (The Control of Nature), geology (in several books), as well as a short book entirely on the subject of oranges. One of his most widely read books is about the Alaskan wilderness (Coming into the Country). His newest book, Uncommon Carriers, due out in May 2006, is about freight transportation.

McPhee has profiled a number of famous people, including conservationist David Brower and the young Bill Bradley, whom McPhee followed closely during Bradley's four-year basketball career at Princeton University. The resulting book, A Sense of Where You Are, is a classic of non-fiction writing -- a literary craftsman's admiring profile of a basketball craftsman. But some of McPhee's most memorable work describes people who work out of the limelight: a carver of birch bark canoes, a bush pilot, and a French-speaking wine maker in the Swiss army. Almost all of his works have a human interest flavor, though their underlying topics are varied.

McPhee is also a renowned nonfiction writing instructor at Princeton University, having taught generations of aspiring undergraduate writers, many of whom have achieved distinction in literature and journalism. Among his former students is David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and current editor of The New Yorker. McPhee still teaches his writing seminar two years out of every three, and is teaching again during the spring 2006 semester.

Twice married, McPhee is the father of four daughters.

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Books by John McPhee

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Awards

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External links

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