A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1965, expanded from a New Yorker profile. John McPhee was thirty-four and had been writing for The New Yorker for two years. The subject — Bill Bradley, then a Princeton senior and the finest college basketball player in the country — became the occasion for McPhee’s first sustained demonstration of his method: using a specific subject to explore general questions about human excellence.
The title refers to Bradley’s uncanny spatial awareness on the court — his ability to know, without looking, exactly where he was relative to the basket and to other players. McPhee describes Bradley’s practice habits (solitary hours of repetitive drills, a work ethic that borders on obsession), his game (the bank shot, the backdoor cut, the pump fake), and his intelligence (a Rhodes Scholar who read Montaigne between games). The subject is basketball; the real subject is how excellence is achieved through discipline, attention, and the integration of intelligence with physical skill.
McPhee’s prose is already distinctive: precise without being technical, admiring without being sycophantic, structured with the elegance of a well-designed building. The profile demonstrates that any subject — even college basketball — can yield serious literary art if approached with sufficient intelligence and craft.
Collecting A Sense of Where You Are
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1965): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good: $75–$200
- Signed: $400–$800
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. McPhee’s first book.
Bradley on the Court
A Sense of Where You Are (1965) was John McPhee’s first book — a profile of Bill Bradley, then a senior at Princeton and the greatest college basketball player in America, who would later become a Rhodes Scholar, a New York Knick, and a U.S. Senator. The book originated as a New Yorker profile and established the template McPhee would follow for six decades: intensely observed, structurally inventive non-fiction that finds the universal in the particular. His description of Bradley’s basketball intelligence — his ability to know exactly where he was on the court without looking — gave the book its title and became a metaphor for a certain kind of embodied excellence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is John McPhee? McPhee (b. 1931) is an American non-fiction writer and staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965. He has published over thirty books on subjects ranging from geology to oranges to nuclear physics. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World (1998) and is widely regarded as the greatest living practitioner of literary non-fiction. He has taught writing at Princeton since 1975.