Uncommon Carriers was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006. McPhee rides with freight movers: a chemical tanker truck driver on the interstates, a towboat captain pushing coal barges on the Illinois River, a UPS pilot flying packages across the country, and a railroad engineer driving trains through Georgia. Each journey reveals the hidden infrastructure that moves goods across the continent — the systems that ordinary people never see but that make modern life possible.
The book is vintage late McPhee: companionable, curious, technically precise, and organized around the principle that any subject becomes fascinating when examined closely enough. The truck driver knows things about his tanker (how chemicals behave in transit, how to handle emergencies) that constitute a genuine expertise invisible to other motorists. The barge captain reads the river (currents, shoals, lock chambers) with a knowledge as deep as any geologist’s understanding of rocks.
McPhee is in his mid-seventies and writing with the same energy and curiosity he brought to his first books four decades earlier. The prose has, if anything, grown more economical — there is no padding, no digression that does not earn its place, no sentence that could be cut without loss. The book argues implicitly that civilization depends on the unglamorous competence of people who move things from where they are to where they need to be.
Collecting Uncommon Carriers
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2006): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Signed: $40–$80
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
Moving Things
Uncommon Carriers (2006) collects pieces about transportation — McPhee rides with a long-haul trucker carrying hazardous chemicals, sails on a container ship through Illinois waterways, hitches a ride on a coal train through the Appalachian coalfields, and studies the UPS sorting hub in Louisville. The book is vintage late McPhee: the subjects are unglamorous, the writing is precise and absorbing, and the reader comes away understanding aspects of American infrastructure that are normally invisible. The trucker piece, “A Fleet of One,” is a masterclass in profile writing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is McPhee’s writing method? McPhee is famous for his meticulous process: extensive research and note-taking, structural planning using hand-drawn diagrams, and multiple drafts. He writes in longhand and on computer, and his pieces typically go through four or more complete revisions before publication.