John McPhee: His Life

 

Once called “the best journalist in America” by The Washington Post, John Angus McPhee (born March 8, 1931, in Princeton, New Jersey) is a writer and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Regarded as the key figure in the field of creative nonfiction, his book Annals of the Former World won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Early Life

John McPhee was born and raised in Princeton New Jersey. The son of a physician who worked for Princeton University’s athletic department, he attended Princeton High School and then the university itself, graduating in 1953 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then went to Cambridge to study at Magdalene College for a year.

While at Princeton, McPhee appeared frequently on an early television game show called “Twenty Questions,” wherein contestants attempted to guess the object of the game by asking yes or no questions. McPhee was one of a group of “whiz kids” appearing on the show.

Professional Writing Career

From 1957 to 1964, McPhee worked at Time magazine as an associate editor. In 1965 he jumped to The New Yorker as a staff writer, a life-long goal; over the course of the next five decades, the majority of McPhee’s journalism would appear in the pages of that magazine. He published his first book that year as well; A Sense of Where You Are was an expansion of a magazine profile he’d written about Bill Bradley, professional basketball player and, later, U.S. Senator. This set a life-long pattern of McPhee’s longer works beginning as shorter pieces initially appearing in The New Yorker.

Since 1965, McPhee has published over 30 books on a wide variety of subjects, as well as countless articles and standalone essays in magazines and newspapers. All of his books started off as shorter pieces that appeared or were intended for The New Yorker. His work has covered an incredibly wide range of subject matter, from profiles of individuals (Levels of the Game) to examinations of entire regions (The Pine Barrens) to scientific and academic subjects, most notably his series of books concerning the geology of the western United States, which were collected into the single volume Annals of the Former World, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction in 1999.

McPhee’s most famous and widely-read book is Coming into the Country, published in 1976. It was the product of a series of travels through the state of Alaska accompanied by guides, bush pilots, and prospectors.

Writing Style

McPhee’s subjects are very personal—he writes about things he’s interested in, which in 1967 included oranges, the subject of his 1967 book titled, appropriately enough, Oranges. This personal approach has led some critics to consider McPhee’s writing to be a unique genre called Creative Nonfiction, an approach to factual reporting that brings an intimately personal slant to the work. Instead of seeking merely to report facts and paint accurate portraits, McPhee infuses his work with an opinion and viewpoint presented so subtly it’s often overlooked consciously even as it’s absorbed unconsciously.

Structure is the key element of McPhee’s writing. He has stated that structure is what absorbs most of his effort when working on a book, and he laboriously outlines and arranges the work’s structure before writing a word. His books are therefore best understood in the order in which they present information, even if the individual essay-like sections contain beautiful and elegant writing, which they frequently do. Reading a work by John McPhee is more about understanding why he chooses to relay an anecdote, factual list, or momentous event at the time in his narrative that he does.

This is what sets McPhee’s nonfiction apart from other works, and what makes it creative in a way most other nonfiction work is not—the manipulation of structure. Instead of following a simple linear timeline, McPhee treats his subjects almost as fictional characters, choosing what to reveal about them and when without actually inventing or fictionalizing anything. As he wrote in his book on the craft of writing, Draft No. 4:

You’re a nonfiction writer. You can’t move [events] around like a king’s pawn or a queen’s bishop. But you can, to an important and effective extent, arrange a structure that is completely faithful to fact.