McPhee, John

John McPhee, in full John Angus McPhee, (born March 8, 1931, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.), American journalist whose nonfiction books are accessible and informative on a wide variety of topics—particularly profiles of figures in sports, science, and the environment. Many of his books are adaptations of articles he published in The New Yorker magazine.

After graduating from Princeton University (A.B., 1953), McPhee studied for a year at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He served as an associate editor at Time magazine (1957–64) and a staff writer at The New Yorker (from 1965). His first book, A Sense of Where You Are (1965), is based on an article he wrote for The New Yorker on Bill Bradley, basketball player and Rhodes scholar (and from 1978 to 1996, U.S. senator). Subjects of McPhee’s subsequent profiles include a preparatory school administrator in The Headmaster (1966), tennis players in Levels of the Game (1969) and Arthur Ashe Remembered (1993), a conservationist in Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), a boat craftsman in The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), and a merchant marine in Looking for a Ship (1990).

McPhee focused on central New Jersey in The Pine Barrens (1968), the Scottish Highlands in The Crofter and the Laird (1970), Alaska in Coming into the Country (1977), and Switzerland in La Place de la Concorde Suisse (1984). He wrote a series of books on the geology of the western United States, which include Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), and Assembling California (1993). The four books, as well as Crossing the Craton, were collected in a single volume, Annals of the Former World (1998), which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. McPhee also examined the citrus industry in Oranges (1967), aeronautical engineering in The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), nuclear terrorism in The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), American shad in Founding Fish (2002), and freight transportation in Uncommon Carriers (2006).

Among McPhee’s collections of essays are A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (1968), Pieces of the Frame (1975), The John McPhee Reader (1976), Giving Good Weight (1979), Table of Contents (1985), and Irons in the Fire (1997). Another book of essays, Silk Parachute, published in 2010, is an uncharacteristically revealing view of the author. McPhee’s later works included Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017) and the essay collection The Patch (2018).

In 2008 McPhee received a George Polk Career Award for lifetime achievement in journalism, one of the highest honours given in the field.