John McPhee - WikiHQ

John Angus McPhee (born March 8, 1931) is an American author. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Background

McPhee has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for most of his life. He was born in Princeton, the son of the Princeton University athletic department's physician, Harry McPhee. He was educated at Princeton High School, then spent a postgraduate year at Deerfield Academy, before graduating from Princeton University in 1953 with a senior thesis titled "Skimmer Burns" and spending a year at Magdalene College, Cambridge. McPhee was a member of University Cottage Club while a student at Princeton.

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. One of his roommates at Princeton was 1951 Heisman Trophy winner Dick Kazmaier.

Twice married, McPhee is the father of four daughters from his first marriage to Pryde Brown: the novelists Jenny McPhee and Martha McPhee, photographer Laura McPhee, and architecture historian Sarah McPhee.

Writing career

McPhee's writing career began at Time magazine, and led to a long association with the weekly magazine The New Yorker from 1963 to the present. Many of his 31 books include material originally written for The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965.

Unlike Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, who helped kick-start the "new journalism" of the 1960s, McPhee produced a gentler, more literary style of writing that more thoroughly incorporated techniques from fiction. He avoided Wolfe's and Thompson's stream-of-consciousness style, using detailed description of characters and vivid language to make his writing lively and personal, even when it focused on obscure or difficult topics. He is highly regarded by fellow writers for the quality, quantity, and diversity of his literary output.

Reflecting his personal interests, McPhee's subjects are highly eclectic. He has written pieces on lifting-body development (The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed), the psyche and experience of a nuclear physicist (The Curve of Binding Energy), a New Jersey wilderness area (The Pine Barrens), the United States Merchant Marine (Looking for a Ship), farmers' markets (Giving Good Weight), the movement of coal across America ("Coal Train" in Uncommon Carriers), the shifting flow of the Mississippi River ("Atchafalaya" in The Control of Nature), geology (in several books), as well as a short book entirely about oranges. One of his most widely read books, Coming into the Country, is about the three faces of Alaska: the urban, the rural, and the Alaskan wilderness.

McPhee has profiled a number of famous people, including conservationist David Brower in Encounters with the Archdruid, and the young Bill Bradley, whom McPhee followed closely during Bradley's four-year basketball career at Princeton University.

Teaching

McPhee has been a nonfiction writing instructor at Princeton University since 1974, having taught generations of aspiring undergraduate writers as the Ferris Professor of Journalism. Many of his students have achieved distinction:

Timothy Ferriss, entrepreneur and author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body
Peter Hessler, contributor to The New Yorker and author of three books about China
Jim Kelly, former managing editor of Time magazine
Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and other books about infectious disease epidemics and bioterrorism
David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and editor-in-chief of The New Yorker since 1998
Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and other books
Richard Stengel, former managing editor of Time magazine
Jennifer Weiner, best-selling author of Good In Bed, In Her Shoes, and other novels
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

Awards and honors

McPhee has received many literary honors, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, awarded for Annals of the Former World.

Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1977)
Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993)
Finalist, National Book Award (science) for The Curve of Binding Energy
Nominated, National Book Award (science), for Encounters with the Archdruid
Wallace Stegner Award (2011) for "sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore, or an understanding of the West".
National Book Critics Circle Award Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (2017)

Bibliography

Books

{| class='wikitable sortable'

! Title !! Date !! Publication Details !! Notes

|A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley ||1965 ||New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || A profile of Hall of Fame basketball player and Rhodes Scholar Bill Bradley.

|The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden, of Deerfield || 1966 || || Biography of Frank Boyden, long time headmaster of Deerfield Academy.

|Oranges || 1967 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || The history and significance of the farming of oranges, how farmers have struggled with frost and how horticulturists have introduced new breeds of citrus.

|The Pine Barrens || 1968 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || The story of the near wilderness central area of New Jersey, known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens.

|A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles || 1968 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || Collection.

|Levels of the Game || 1969 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || Explores the relationship between two tennis players, Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, and their tennis match at the 1968 US Open.

|The Crofter and the Laird || 1970 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || A memoir of the author's stay with his family on the island of Colonsay in Scotland, where his forebears had been raised.

|Encounters with the Archdruid || 1971 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || Discussions in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon - with "Archdruid" David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth.

|Wimbledon || 1972 || New York: The Viking Press || Contains two essays – "Hoad on Court 5" (originally published in 1971 as "Centre Court" and collected in Pieces of the Frame) and "Twynam of Wimbledon" (originally published in 1968 and collected in A Roomful of Hovings) – and photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

|The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed || 1973 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || Story of the Aereon, a combination aerodyne/aerostat, a.k.a. hybrid airship.

|The Curve of Binding Energy || 1974 || New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux || Traveling American nuclear institutions with Theodore Taylor, one of the founders of those technologies. Finalist for the National Book Award.