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Early Life

John McPhee was born in 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in the town whose university would quietly anchor much of his life and work. His father was a physician closely involved with Princeton University athletics, and the rhythms of campus and community gave the young McPhee an early sense of place that later became a signature in his prose. He developed an observant eye, a comfort with experts and institutions, and a patient curiosity about landscapes and people that would define his reporting. After schooling in Princeton, he enrolled at Princeton University, where a disciplined attention to language and structure began to take shape. The university milieu, with its coaches, scientists, and scholars, offered him the first constellation of experts whose voices would populate his pages for decades.

Emergence as a Writer

McPhee began publishing magazine pieces soon after college and, in the early 1960s, started a long association with the New Yorker. Under the editorship of William Shawn, who nurtured generations of distinctive voices, McPhee found a home for a form of nonfiction that was reported as rigorously as journalism and shaped with the care of literature. One of his earliest and most enduring profiles was of Bill Bradley, the Princeton basketball star who later became a United States senator. That profile became his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, and it established a method: inhabit a subject so fully that the narrative reveals the larger systems around it, whether sport, education, or civic life.

Defining Works and Subjects

Across scores of New Yorker articles and more than thirty books, McPhee assembled a panorama of modern life by focusing on precise, sometimes unexpected entry points. The Pine Barrens introduced readers to the ecology and culture of a largely overlooked New Jersey wilderness. Oranges began with a piece of fruit and unfolded into a global industry. Levels of the Game used a single tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner to excavate class, race, temperament, and strategy. Encounters with the Archdruid staged a series of journeys that brought environmentalist David Brower face-to-face with formidable antagonists, including Floyd Dominy, the powerful commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. The Curve of Binding Energy centered on weapons designer Theodore B. Taylor and opened a searching inquiry into nuclear proliferation and the vulnerabilities of modern society. Coming into the Country became one of the definitive books on Alaska, a sprawling portrait of landscapes and people at a threshold between frontier and modernity. Looking for a Ship examined the work and lore of the U.S. Merchant Marine, while The Control of Nature narrated human attempts to push back against rivers, lava, and debris flows.

Geology and Annals of the Former World

McPhee is closely identified with a magisterial, decades-long project on North American geology that culminated in Annals of the Former World, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In the component books Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California, he traveled the continent with geologists whose knowledge and personalities gave shape to deep time. Two of the most memorable companions were Kenneth S. Deffeyes, the Princeton geologist whose exuberant explanations made plate tectonics vivid at roadcut scale, and Eldridge Moores of the University of California, Davis, whose fieldwork in California helped McPhee narrate a coast assembled from far-flung terranes. The human presence in these volumes is inseparable from the rocks; McPhee's life on the road with these scientists is an apprenticeship in looking, measuring, and revising hypotheses in the field.

Teaching and Mentorship

Starting in the 1970s, McPhee taught writing at Princeton, where his seminar became legendary for its rigor and generosity. His students included David Remnick, who would later become editor of the New Yorker, and Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone. Generations of journalists and nonfiction authors have credited McPhee with giving them a durable vocabulary for structure, reporting, and revision. His guidance often continued beyond the classroom, as former students found their way into magazines and books. Under Remnick's editorship, McPhee's pieces continued to appear in the New Yorker, linking teacher and student in a public editorial relationship that spanned decades.

Style and Method

McPhee's prose is spare, exact, and musical, steering the reader through complexity without condescension or ornament for its own sake. He is fascinated by structure: how to order scenes, braid subjects, and calibrate digression so that a narrative delivers knowledge with momentum. His craft book Draft No. 4 distills a lifetime of practice into lessons about outlines, fact-gathering, and voice, demystifying process without reducing it to formula. He is a companionable presence in his work, often visible on the page, taking notes on a ferry, riding in a truck cab, or sitting in a kitchen, but he keeps the focus on the worlds and people he is trying to understand. He leans on conversation with experts, scientists, athletes, ship captains, farmers, and lets their language carry technical truth while he engineers the reader's path through it.

Personal Life

McPhee has remained closely tied to Princeton, where he has lived for much of his life. The town's proximity to the university's libraries and laboratories, and to the magazine world of New York, created a practical geography for his work: short distances to archives and long trips to field sites. His family is interwoven with the arts. Among his daughters are Jenny McPhee, a novelist and translator; Martha McPhee, a novelist; and Laura McPhee, a photographer. Their careers parallel his own commitment to craft and signal a household in which language and image were part of daily life. The web of people around him, from classroom and newsroom to family table, formed a community that sustained his output over six decades.

Recognition and Legacy

McPhee's standing as a pioneer of creative nonfiction rests on his consistency at the highest level and the breadth of his curiosity. The Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World formalized a reputation already secure among writers and readers who saw in his books a fusion of reporting, narrative geometry, and humility before fact. His colleagues at the New Yorker, from William Shawn to David Remnick, provided the editorial continuity that allowed him to pursue multi-year projects at magazine length and then in books. Many of the figures he wrote about, Bill Bradley, David Brower, Floyd Dominy, Arthur Ashe, Clark Graebner, Theodore B. Taylor, Kenneth Deffeyes, Eldridge Moores, have entered the literary memory of readers through McPhee's portrayals, each rendered with a fairness that resists caricature. His influence is visible in any nonfiction that takes the detour as essential, that uses structure to make complexity comprehensible, and that trusts the reader to follow a careful map from the particular to the vast.