John Angus McPhee is an American writer, widely 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. In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". 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, Dr. 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, 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. One of his roommates at Princeton was 1951 Heisman Trophy winner Dick Kazmaier. Twice married, McPhee is the father of four daughters: 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. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965. Many of his twenty-nine books include material originally written for this latter periodical. 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. McPhee avoided the streams of consciousness styles of Wolfe and Thompson, but used detailed description of characters and vivid language to make his writing lively and personal, even when it focuses 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 psyche and experience of a nuclear engineer, a New Jersey wilderness area, the United States Merchant Marine, farmers' markets, the movement of coal across America, the shifting flow of the Mississippi River, geology, 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 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 is also a renowned nonfiction writing instructor at Princeton University, having taught generations of aspiring undergraduate writers. McPhee teaches his writing seminar every year in the spring semester. Many of McPhee's students have achieved their own distinction for writing:
David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and current editor-in-chief of The New Yorker
nominated, National Book Award for Encounters with the Archdruid
Wallace Stegner Award for "sustained contribution to the cultural identity of the West through literature, art, history, lore, or an understanding of the West".
