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John McPhee

Did you mean: John McPhee, Jack McPhee, John McPhee (Australian politician), John McPhee (footballer), Bid McPhee (baseball Hall of Famer)

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

john mcphee

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John Angus McPhee
(born March 8, 1931, Princeton, N.J., U.S.) U.S. journalist and nonfiction writer. He attended Princeton University. After working as an associate editor at Time (1957 – 64), he became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1965. His nonfiction covers a wide variety of topics. His first book was on Bill Bradley; places he has written about include New Jersey, Alaska, the American West (several books), and Switzerland; other topics include the citrus industry, aeronautical engineering, the birch-bark canoe, and nuclear terrorism. He has taught journalism at Princeton since 1975. His later works include Annals of the Former World (1998, Pulitzer Prize). In 2008 he received a George Polk Award for career achievement.

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(b. 1931)

1977Coming into the Country. McPhee's depiction of Alaskan life establishes his reputation as one of America's finest nature and personal essay writers. Born in New Jersey and educated at Princeton, McPhee had been an editor for Time magazine and a staff writer for The New Yorker. His previous books included Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975).
1993Assembling California. A geological history of a state notorious for earthquakes is the result of fifteen years of field research conducted with tectonicists and sedimentologists. McPhee assembles their arcane knowledge into readable and beautifully crafted prose.
1998Annals of the Former World. McPhee collects his four previous volumes, describing his journeys across America with professional geologists--Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), and Assembling California (1993). He adds a fifth, Crossing the Craton, to create what one reviewer calls "the epic on the Earth's formation."

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John McPhee

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For other persons named John McPhee, see John McPhee (disambiguation).
John McPhee
JohnMcphee crop.jpg
Born John Angus McPhee
March 8, 1931 (1931-03-08) (age 78)
Princeton, New Jersey
Occupation Writer

John Angus McPhee (born 8 March 1931) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer widely considered one of the pioneers of narrative nonfiction.

Unlike Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, who helped kick-start the "new journalism" which remolded nonfiction in the 1960s, McPhee produced a gentler style of literary journalism 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. He is highly regarded among fellow writers for the quality and quantity of his literary output.[1]

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Background

McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of the Princeton University athletic department's physician, Dr. Harry McPhee. John was educated at Princeton High School, then spent a postgraduate year at Deerfield Academy, before attending Princeton University and the University of Cambridge.

While at Princeton, McPhee went to New York once or twice a week to appear as the juvenile panelist on the radio and television quiz program Twenty Questions.[2]

Twice married, McPhee is the father of four daughters, among them the novelists Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee[3], and photographer Laura McPhee.

Writing career

McPhee's first book (1965), was a profile of Princeton senior – and future pro basketball star – Bill Bradley

McPhee's writing career began at Time magazine and led to a long association with The New Yorker weekly magazine beginning in 1965 and continuing to the present. Many of his twenty-nine books include material originally written for that magazine.

McPhee 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, and in 2009 he received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University.

McPhee's subjects, reflecting his personal interests, are highly eclectic. He has written pieces on lifting body development (The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed), 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, Coming into the Country, is about the Alaska wilderness. His most recent book, Uncommon Carriers, published 16 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 builder of birch bark canoes (Henri Vaillancourt), a bush pilot, and a French-speaking wine maker in the Swiss army.

Teaching

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 are David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and current editor of The New Yorker; Richard Stengel and Jim Kelly, the current and former managing editors of Time magazine; journalist Robert Wright, former senior editor at The New Republic and columnist for Time, Slate and the New York Times, and author of award-winning books; and Peter Hessler, The New Yorker's China correspondent. McPhee still teaches his writing seminar two years out of every three, most recently during the spring 2009 semester.[4]

Awards

Works

Notes

  1. ^ While being interviewed on the 27 August 2009 edition of Radio West (KUER, Salt Lake City, Utah), writer Christopher Cokinos said that he has a sign above his desk which says Too tired to write? John McPhee isn't.
  2. ^ "A Letter From The Publisher: 23 Nov. 1962". Time. 1962-11-23. ISSN 0040-718X. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829455,00.html. Retrieved 2008-09-18. 
  3. ^ Birnbaum, Robert (25 December 2002). "Jenny & Martha McPhee". Identity Theory. http://www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum79.html. Retrieved 2008-03-16. 
  4. ^ http://registrar.princeton.edu/timetable/course_details.xml?courseid=003788&term=1094

External links

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Did you mean: John McPhee, Jack McPhee, John McPhee (Australian politician), John McPhee (footballer), Bid McPhee (baseball Hall of Famer)


 

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2009 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John McPhee".  Read more

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