John McPhee

John McPhee is the most important American nonfiction writer of the second half of the twentieth century — a writer whose extraordinary range of subject matter (geology, oranges, basketball, nuclear physics, birch-bark canoes, the Swiss Army, commercial trucking, shad fishing, the New Jersey Pine Barrens) is matched by an equally extraordinary range of structural innovation, and whose six decades at The New Yorker have produced a body of work that defines what creative nonfiction can accomplish. He is the writer whom other nonfiction writers read to learn how to write.

Princeton and The New Yorker

John Angus McPhee was born on 8 March 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey — a town he has never really left. He grew up the son of a team physician for Princeton University, attended Princeton High School, and studied English at Princeton University (Class of 1953), where he took the creative writing course that would become the model for his own legendary teaching. He studied briefly at Cambridge, then worked at Time magazine before joining The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1965 — a position he has held for nearly sixty years, one of the longest tenures in the magazine’s history. He has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton since 1975.

The Method

McPhee’s great innovation is structural. Each piece is organised according to a principle suited to its subject. Levels of the Game (1969), about a tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, alternates between points in the match and the players’ biographies, so that the structure of the piece mirrors the structure of a tennis match. Encounters with the Archdruid (1971) is built in three sections, each pairing the environmentalist David Brower with an antagonist in a different landscape. The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973) is structured like the flight path of the experimental aircraft it describes.

He plans these structures meticulously, drawing diagrams on index cards pinned to a bulletin board, working out the arrangement of material before he writes a word. Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017) describes this method in detail and has become the most widely assigned text on nonfiction writing in American universities.

The Books

A Sense of Where You Are (1965), a profile of the basketball player Bill Bradley at Princeton, was his first book and established his method: exhaustive reporting, structural ingenuity, and an ability to make any subject compelling through the sheer intensity of his attention and the precision of his prose.

Oranges (1967) is about oranges — the history, cultivation, commerce, and culture of citrus — and it is fascinating. The Pine Barrens (1968) is about the wilderness of central New Jersey, a landscape most Americans don’t know exists, and the people who live there. Coming into the Country (1977), about Alaska, is his longest and most complex book — a three-part exploration of the state’s wilderness, its urban capital, and its frontier settlers.

La Place de la Concorde Suisse (1984) is about the Swiss Army. The Control of Nature (1989) is about human attempts to manage geological and hydrological forces — the Army Corps of Engineers versus the Mississippi River, Icelanders versus volcanic lava, Los Angeles versus debris flows. Each narrative demonstrates the hubris and occasional necessity of trying to control natural processes.

Annals of the Former World

The geology series is McPhee’s masterwork. Beginning with Basin and Range (1981) and continuing through In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), Assembling California (1993), and Crossing the Craton (1998), McPhee crossed the North American continent along Interstate 80 in the company of different geologists, learning to read the landscape as a text written in deep time.

The series was collected as Annals of the Former World (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It is 660 pages about plate tectonics, geological time, and the landscape of North America — and it is riveting, partly because the science is genuinely dramatic (continents colliding, oceans disappearing, mountain ranges rising and eroding away) and partly because McPhee’s geologists are vivid, eccentric, passionate characters.

Influence and Legacy

McPhee’s influence on American nonfiction is immeasurable. His structural innovations have been studied and imiated by generations of writers. His ability to make any subject interesting — not through sensationalism but through depth of reporting and precision of language — has set the standard for literary nonfiction. His Princeton writing course has trained many of the best nonfiction writers of the last four decades.

His prose style is deceptively simple — clear, unpretentious, rhythmically varied, with an eye for the telling detail and the perfect quotation. He never appears to be showing off, which is the hardest thing a writer can do.

Collecting McPhee

A Sense of Where You Are (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965) in first edition with dust jacket is the key collecting target — his first book, with a modest print run. The Pine Barrens (FSG, 1968) and Coming into the Country (FSG, 1977) are also collected. Annals of the Former World (FSG, 1998), the Pulitzer winner, is the major late work. McPhee has signed at Princeton events, and signed copies are available.