John McPhee

Personal

Born March 8, 1931, in Princeton, NJ; son of Harry Roemer (a physician) and Mary (Ziegler) McPhee; married Pryde Brown, March 16, 1957 (marriage ended); married Yolanda Whitman (a horticulturist), March 8, 1972; children: (first marriage) Laura, Sarah, Jenny, Martha; stepchildren: Cole, Andrew, Katherine, Vanessa Harrop. Education: Princeton University, A.B., 1953; graduate study at Cambridge University, 1953-54.

Addresses

Home—Drake's Corner Rd., Princeton, NJ 08540. Office—c/o New Yorker, 25 West 43rd St., New York, NY 10036.

Career

Journalist, playwright, and essayist. Playwright for "Robert Montgomery Presents" (television show), 1955-57; Time magazine, New York, NY, associate editor, 1957-64; New Yorker magazine, New York, NY, staff writer, beginning 1964; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Ferris Professor of Journalism, beginning 1975.

Member

Geological Society of America (fellow).

Awards, Honors

Award in Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1977; American Association of Petroleum Geologists Journalism Award, 1982, 1986; Woodrow Wilson Award, Princeton University, 1982; John Wesley Powell Award, U.S. Geological Survey, 1988; John Burroughs Medal, 1990; Walton Sullivan Award, American Geophysical Union, 1993; Pulitzer Prize, Nonfiction, 1999, for Annals of the Former World; Litt.D. from Bates College, 1978, Colby College, 1978, Williams College, 1979, University of Alaska, 1980, and College of William and Mary, 1988; Sc.D. from Rutgers University, 1988, and Maine Maritime Academy, 1992.

Writings

A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1965.

The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1966.

Oranges, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1967.

The Pine Barrens, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1968.

A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1969.

The Crofter and the Laird, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1969.

Levels of the Game, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1969.

Encounters with the Archdruid (also see below), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1972.

Wimbledon: A Celebration, photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt, Viking (New York, NY), 1972.

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1973.

The Curve of Binding Energy, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1974.

Pieces of the Frame (collection), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1975.

The Survival of the Bark Canoe, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1975.

The John McPhee Reader, edited by William Howarth, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1977.

Coming into the Country, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1977.

Giving Good Weight, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1979.

(With Rowell Galen) Alaska: Images of the Country, Sierra Club (San Francisco, CA), 1981.

Basin and Range (also see below), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1981.

In Suspect Terrain (also see below), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1983.

Heirs of General Practice, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1984.

La Place de la Concorde Suisse, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1984.

Annals of the Former World (includes essays from Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1984.

Table of Contents, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1985.

Rising from the Plains (also see below), Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1986.

Outcroppings (includes essays from Encounters with the Archdruid, Basin and Range, and Rising from the Plains), photographs by Tom Till, Peregrine Smith (Layton, UT), 1988.

The Control of Nature, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1989.

Looking for a Ship, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1990.

Assembling California, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1993.

The Ransom of Russian Art, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1994.

The Second John McPhee Reader, edited by David Remnick and Patricia Strachan, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1996.

Irons in the Fire, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor, with Carol Rigolot) The Princeton Anthology of Writing: Favorite Pieces by the Ferris/McGraw Writers at Princeton University, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2001.

The Founding Fish, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2002.

Sidelights

"The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved. The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far and to be going in so many directions that it seems an act of almost pure hubris to assert that some landmark of our world is fixed at 73 degrees 57 minutes and 53 seconds west longitude and 40 degrees 51 minutes and 14 seconds north latitude—a temporary description, at any rate, as if for a boat on the sea." Thus begins John McPhee's Basin and Range, a book that also comprises the first section in his monumental compendium Annals of the Former World, which takes a look at the world through more than four-and-a-half billion years of geologic time, providing "the student of nature with one of the most interesting inquiries into the powers and the limits of human thinking about the natural world," according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Mark C. Long. But nature is only one of the topics McPhee has tackled in his long and distinguished career as an essayist and writer for the New Yorker, where many of his pieces were first published. "Whatever his subject matter, McPhee finds a way to make it interesting and artistic," asserted Norman Sims in another Dictionary of Literary Biography essay on the author.

McPhee's "beautifully articulated structures, clear prose, and participatory voice have become a model for other literary journalists," noted Sims, adding that the New Jersey-born writer's "work thrives on narrative and characterization" and that he "proves the value of what is often considered ordinary life, using writing techniques and a style that are far from ordinary." McPhee has tackled subjects from tennis to oranges to art, but has always returned to the world of nature in the end. He began his career as a literary essayist during the 1960s, when, according to Long, "American nature writing was infused with the social and political urgencies of late-twentieth-century environmentalism." This "modern age of environmental activism, ushered in by such writers as Rachel Carson, widened public concern with environmental issues," Long added, noting that "McPhee has consistently been engaged with environmental issues although uninterested in environmental advocacy or activism." Typically, in an essay McPhee takes a narrow view of a subject and in it finds a metaphor for a wider understanding of the natural world. This technique has seen him through three dozen books and has won him awards, critical acclaim, and a loyal readership.

Many critics agree that the appeal of McPhee's nonfiction books—most of which collect his New Yorker articles—resides in their offbeat subject matter. "Sometimes it seems that McPhee deliberately chooses unpromising subjects, just to show what he can do with them," remarked New Republic reviewer Richard Horwich. Sims called McPhee's range of subjects "unprecedented" in its variety and noted that it includes "basketball and tennis, art and airplanes, the New Jersey Pine Barrens and the wilderness of Alaska, atomic energy and birchbark canoes, oranges and farmers, the Swiss Army and United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the control of nature and the scientific revolution in plate tectonics that created modern geology."

A Northeastern Perspective

John Angus McPhee was born in 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of a doctor who specialized in sports medicine and served the athletic programs of Princeton University. The youngest of three children, McPhee was highly influenced by his northeastern surroundings as a youth. As Long quoted the author as remarking, "If you make a list of all the work I've ever done, and put a little mark beside things that relate to activities and interests I had before I was twenty, you'd have a little mark beside well over ninety percent of the pieces of writing." Such influences include sports that have led to profiles of basketball player Bill Bradley and tennis great Arthur Ashe. They also include the outdoors, to which McPhee was introduced during summers spent at a camp where his father worked. "I grew up in a summer camp—Keewaydin," Long quoted McPhee as saying, "whose specialty was canoes and canoe travel." His life in Princeton, an upper-middle-class town populated by scholars and worldly folks, also informed McPhee's world view.

McPhee attended public school through high school and then spent one year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Thereafter, he enrolled at Princeton University, studying creative writing with poet Randall Jarrell, and with R. P. Blackmuir. After a postgraduate year at England's Cambridge University, McPhee returned to the United States and began writing for Time magazine. However, he had dreams of being published in the prestigious New Yorker, submitting article after article, only to have them rejected. Then in 1963 his piece "Basketball and Beefeaters" was finally accepted, and was followed two years later by his essay on Bradley, "A Sense of Where You Are." This essay earned McPhee a place as a staff writer for the New Yorker that he has continued to maintain. The Bradley piece also became McPhee's first published book, published in 1965. The following year his second title appeared, again a book about an exceptional person. The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield draws on its author's own experiences as a student at Deerfield Academy.

McPhee's third book, Oranges, is "the first indication of his interest in the history of attempts to use nature to satisfy human desires and needs," according to Long. The volume delves into the history, growth cycles, and manufacture of that one citrus fruit. His 1968 book, The Pine Barrens, looks at New Jersey's forests, which are endangered by human encroachment, and became "the first of [McPhee's] . . . books to take its place in the American tradition of nature writing," as Long pointed out. Further profiles followed, including a book on tennis great Arthur Ashe titled Levels of the Game, and a profile of Sierra Club head David Brower titled Encounters with the Archdruid.

McPhee's 1969 work, A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles, is a compilation of some of his shorter New Yorker profiles. He also tackles science and technology in The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, an examination of the design and first test flights of a new airplane, and The Curve of Binding Energy, which presents an introduction to atomic energy and profiles a theoretical physicist. His The Survival of the Bark Canoe is part history, part how-to manual, and part profile as it introduces readers to canoemaker Henri Vaillencourt. "By the time we enter [Vaillencourt's] obsession, we are drawn irresistibly to the tapering of thwarts, the laminating of stempieces, the goring of bark," noted Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in a review of The Survival of the Bark Canoe for the New York Times.

Over his career McPhee has been regarded by many as a gifted liaison between the specialist and the lay reader. He shows a "pleasantly flexible technique, well-mannered and accommodating," as Michiko Kakutani noted in the New York Times Book Review. "Elegant without being elaborate, casual but never flippant, the prose always serves the material at
hand, and combined with an obsession for detail . . . it enables [the author] . . . to translate for the layman the mysteries that preoccupy professionals, be they athletes or engineers," added Kakutani. "He can reveal character in the description of a basketball toss, discover literary metaphors in the movement of subatomic particles."

Coming into His Own

Many critics cite Coming into the Country as one of McPhee's strongest works. In this volume the author presents an insider's view of one of America's last frontiers: Alaska. Published originally as an eight-part series for the New Yorker, the volume consists of "three lengthy bulletins" about the northernmost state, according to Time critic Paul Gray. The first bulletin concerns "a canoe trip that McPhee and four companions took down an unspoiled river in the northwestern reaches of the state, well above the Arctic Circle." In the second section the essayist "tells of a helicopter ride with a committee looking for a site on which to build a new state capital," continued Gray, adding that "The last and longest section covers some wintry months spent in Eagle, a tiny settlement on the Yukon river."

Edward Hoagland, who characterized McPhee as no "risk-taker" in his early books, declared in a New York Times Book Review of Coming into the Country that the author "made his will, took the gambit; and in so doing, he introduced a new generosity of tempo to his work, a leisurely artfulness of organization he has not had before." Hoagland admitted that his "main objection" to McPhee's earlier works was "that he was too aloof with the reader about himself—almost neurotically so—and not aloof enough about some of the subjects of his pieces, over-admiring them, taking them just at their word."

While Atlantic Monthly critic Benjamin DeMott enjoyed McPhee's self-portrait of "his own embarrassments as a city man ravished by the woods but still dependent upon comforts," the reviewer saw a greater merit in Coming into the Country: "Not the least achievement of [the book] is that, in eschewing formulas, it manages simultaneously to represent fairly the positions of the parties in conflict—developers, conservationists, renegade individualists—and to show forth the implications, for human society, of the loss of the ground on which the dream of 'lighting out for The Territory' has immemorially been based." What the reader gains from this work, concluded DeMott, is a sense that "what is really in view in Coming into the Country is a matter not usually met in works of reportage—nothing less than the nature of the human condition." As Long maintained, this book—which earned McPhee the 1977 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters—quickly gained a reputation as a "classic in the tradition of American nature writing."

Annals of the Former World

McPhee has penned a number of essays on North American geology that have been collected in Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California. These books, in turn, were combined with a new essay and republished as 1998's Annals of the Former World. Basin and Range begins with McPhee taking "a deceptively simple cross-country trip: Interstate 80," said Los Angeles Times critic Carolyn See. The author is accompanied by an accomplished geologist who points out the vast history of various western rock formations, and "the ideas do tumble out—ideas about how ranges and basins were formed, about how silver got deposited in those Nevada bonanzas and how the Great Salt Lakes came to be both salty and great," according to Lehmann-Haupt in a New York Times review.

"The descriptions of geologists at work are sympathetic and convincing," wrote C. Vita-Finzi in the Times Literary Supplement, adding that "The digressions into the language and jargon of the subject should prove chastening to its practitioners." Among the theories discussed in Basin and Range is the notion that moving segments of the earth, both on land and in the oceans, will eventually cause the west coast of America to break off into the Pacific, making California an island, as Evan Connell explained in a Washington Post Book World review. "Metaphorically, of course, many people believe this already has happened." McPhee, Connell continued, "discusses such matters easily. His tone is affable, his meandering appropriate, and the tutorial intent of Basin and Range is commendable—for surely nobody could measure the width or depth of our ignorance."

McPhee's In Suspect Terrain "takes its title from the geologists' phrase for country whose history, as recorded in the rocks, is ambiguous or obscure," Wallace Stegner explained in an appraisal of that same work for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Serving as a follow-up to Basin and Range, the book explores the geological relationships in urban areas, including a study of the geology of Brooklyn, New York. "A travelogue across country and through time," In Suspect Terrain "is a most instructive book," found Stegner. While Kakutani wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "the presence of a shaping, interpretive sensibility . . . would have infused [the book with] a measure of welcome warmth," Detroit News contributor Lisa Schwarzbaum maintained that McPhee's "expertise brings us great chunks of information and explication about subjects not always immediately accessible or even fascinating, in a way that makes them both."

Rising from the Plains moves to the Rocky Mountains, as McPhee accompanies geologist David Love in an examination of the geological history of that mountain range and also profiles the family of the geologist. Assembling California finds McPhee accompanying Eldridge Moores, an expert on crustal-ocean rock and plate tectonics from the University of California at Davis, on travels through California's Central Valley, its Coast Range, and Sierra Nevada mountains, as well as along the San Andreas fault line. In the course of these rambles, McPhee presents a geological history of California and its earthquake-prone nature. The author's guide in Assembling California, Moores, is, according to Watkins, a world-class tectonicist who "makes an imaginative and articulate guide as McPhee takes a look at California as the definitive expression of plate tectonics." Watkins referred to the book as "vintage McPhee, swift, lucid, authoritative stuff produced with a reporter's sure eye and a writer's love of language."

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According to T. H. Watkins of the Washington Post Book World, Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California form a "four-volume literary pilgrimage" in which each book is "an exploration of theories, evidences and effects of plate tectonics—[a] science that holds that the surface of the earth is made up of crustal plates that are in constant motion." Supplementing these four books in their republication in Annals of the Former World is the essay "Crossing the Craton," in which McPhee travels with a geochronologist from the University of Kansas through the mid-region of the North American continent to discover its geologic secrets.

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, McPhee's Annals of the Former World earned high praise from critics. Called "sound armchair science at its most pleasurable" by Science contributor Gordon P. Eaton, the book also was commended by Vanessa V. Friedman in Entertainment Weekly. "You will never look at a pebble in the same way again," Friedman wrote. Time reviewer John Skow, with geological whimsy, found Annals of the Former World "spectacularly orogenous and deeply benthic," while a critic for Publishers Weekly wrote that the volume serves as a "feast for all John McPhee fans," being a "major book [that] incorporates some of the author's best work on geology into a comprehensive tour de force." And Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman dubbed Annals of the Former World a "magnificent narrative that not only tracks the drama of North American geological history but also chronicles the rapid evolution of the theories and practice of geology itself."

From deciphering technological jargon to exploring the surface and depths of the earth, McPhee continues to elucidate his fascination and concern for the environment in The Control of Nature, a work comprised of three examples of the battles humans wage against the forces of nature. "What makes such complex, inherently dry subjects fascinating is McPhee himself," reported Chicago Tribune critic Kerry Luft. "A tireless researcher, he piles fact upon simile and explains the most intricate detail with metaphor." From a "tragic" Louisiana situation in which efforts are undertaken to divert the Mississippi River, to the "comic opera" played out in an Icelandic town hoping to avoid destruction by a flow of lava, the author's "narrative emulates the rhythms of the natural flows it describes, each time encountering another monument to human assertion or absurdity," remarked New York Times Book Review critic Stephen Pyne. "There is no single persona to represent either side. Almost everyone is implicated, and nearly everything is diffused." Pyne concluded that The Control of Nature "is a fascinating, if sometimes disjointed, report from three revealing battlefields in humanity's global war against nature."

An Eclectic Gathering of Information

McPhee's ever-curious mind has drawn him into literary investigations of art as well as of geology. A chance encounter aboard a train with economics professor Norton Dodge led the author to write about Dodge's unusual art collection. The Ransom of Russian Art relates how Dodge came to own nine thousand pieces of art produced by six hundred dissident Soviet artists, describes the Soviet persecution of artists from the mid-1950s to the end of the Communist era, and profiles painter Evgeny Rukhin and other artists. The book also includes reproductions of many of the art works under discussion. "Unfortunately, Mr. McPhee never alights on any one artist or idea for very long," commented Harlow Robinson in a review of the book for the New York Times Book Review. "There is a jumpy, almost unfinished quality to the writing here, as though the author could not quite find the key either to Mr. Dodge or to the nonconformist art scene." "McPhee adopts what for him is an unusual stance as an investigative reporter," noted Sims, referencing the author's grilling of Dodge on his association with the CIA, his smuggling activities, and where a college professor could obtain the millions of dollars required to fund such an enterprise.

McPhee may have won widespread acclaim for his nonfiction, but in a New York Times Book Review interview with Stephen Singular he revealed that his early career interests included a variety of genres. "I wrote poems in college—rank imitations of Pope, Yeats, Housman, Eliot. My senior year I wrote a novel. . . . After college, I sat all day in a captain's chair up on 84th Street trying to write plays for live television." As to the occasional criticisms that his work does not include enough personal material, the author dismissed such criteria as "pointless" "You can't be all things," McPhee maintained to Singular. "There are limitations everywhere you look . . . fundamentally, I'm a working journalist and I've got to go out and work." When questioned during a Los Angeles Times interview on the absence of moral judgments in his works, McPhee responded: "I want the judgments to be performed by the reader. There are some people who think that one ought to be more forceful in one's judgments and have an ax to grind. I don't want to grind axes in my writing. But I want to have plenty of axes out there for others to do their own grinding on."

In contrast, a critic for Kirkus Reviews noted a shift toward a more personal perspective in McPhee's The Founding Fish. The critic praised the author for allowing the reader to see things from the fish's perspective, as well as from the viewpoint of the author, "which is a surprise and a pleasure in a writer known more for his shadowy presence than for stepping into the spotlight." This book's subject matter is the Alosa sapidissima, commonly known as the American shad and one of the most primitive of all fish. These fish leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands each year to make their long, arduous journey up river to spawn. McPhee, a long-time angler of the fish—its name means "most savory"—traces its history, its place in nature and—of all things—its place in American history: George Washington fed shad to his starving soldiers at Valley Forge, and fished them commercially, catching 7,760 in 1771. The fish also made a cameo appearance in the life of Henry David Thoreau, played a role in the murder of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, and, according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, "waylaid Confederate General Pickett in the defense of Richmond and hastened the end of the Civil War."

Praising The Founding Fish, Seaman wrote in her Booklist review that "McPhee is in great form here, as informative as always but also funny, unusually self-revealing, and quite passionate in his discussions of the dire effects dams have had on shad and rivers alike." A Kirkus Reviews critic commented that "There isn't a dry patch in this story of a fish and its homewaters," and Bruce Tierney noted in a BookPage online review that "it is to McPhee's credit that he can take such an arcane topic and make it interesting, even compelling, to the casual reader. He provides sufficient data to suit the scientists among his readers, while writing an easy conversational style."

Indeed, it is this ability to make the arcane entertaining that remains the hallmark of McPhee's style. Skow called the author "the most methodical of intuitive writers, or the most intuitive of methodicals." Writing in U.S. News and World Report, Anna Mulrine described the process of reading a McPhee book as akin to "taking a jaunt through a tiny museum stocked with a fascinating hodgepodge of esoteric stuff." Friedman perhaps summed up the author's lasting popularity most succinctly, writing that "McPhee is a writer who could find lyricism and narrative in a garbage can."

If you enjoy the works of John McPhee

If you enjoy the works of John McPhee, you may also want to check out the following books:

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, 1854.

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 1955.

Bary Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 1978.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Anderson, Chris, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1987.

Anderson, Chris, editor, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1989, p. 70.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 36, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 185: American Literary Journalists, 1945-1995, First Series, 1997, Volume 275: Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Prose, 2003.

Kowalewski, Michael, editor, Tempermental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1992, pp. 164-175.

Pearson, Michael, John McPhee, Twayne (New York, NY), 1997.

Sims, Norman, editor, The Literary Journalists, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1984, pp. 3-25.

Sims, Norman, editor, Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1990, pp. 191-205, 206-227.

Sims, Norman, and Mark Kramer, editors, Literary Journalism, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1995, pp. 3-19.

Weber, Ronald, editor, The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1980.

Weltzein, O. Alan and Susan Naramore Maher, Coming into McPhee Country: John McPhee and the Art of Literary Nonfiction, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, January, 1978, Benjamin DeMott, review of Coming into the Country.

Booklist, October 1, 1994, p. 186; April, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Annals of the Former World, p. 1276; September 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of The Founding Fish, p. 3.

Bulletin of Bibliography, January, 1981, pp. 45-51.

Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1984; August 27, 1989.

Chicago Tribune Book World, January 6, 1980; August 27, 1989, Kerry Luft, review of The Control of Nature, p. 7; September 16, 1990.

Creative Nonfiction, Number 1, 1993, pp. 76-87.

Detroit News, July 12, 1981; March 13, 1983, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of In Suspect Terrain; May 13, 1984.

Economist, January 18, 2003, review of The Founding Fish.

Entertainment Weekly, July 24, 1998, Vanessa V. Friedman, review of Annals of the Former World, p. 70.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1994, p. 1195; August 15, 2002, review of The Founding Fish, p. 1200. Library Journal, May 1, 1998, May Paumier Jones, review of Annals of the Former World, p. 134; October 1, 2002, Mary J. Nickum, review of The Founding Fish, p. 124.

Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1981, Carolyn See, review of Basin and Range; August 6, 1989.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 27, 1983, Wallace Stegner, review of In Suspect Terrain; November 9, 1986; July 30, 1989; August 26, 1990.

Maine Times, November 1, 1985, pp. 14-16.

Nation, January 14, 1978.

New Republic, July 11, 1970; September 1, 1973; July 5, 1975; January 7, 1978.

New York Review of Books, March 23, 1978; May 14, 1981; March 2, 1995, pp. 10-13.

New York Times, March 8, 1967; November 2, 1969; July 13, 1973; July 9, 1974; June 18, 1975; November 27, 1975; January 11, 1976, section 11, pp. 20-21; November 25, 1977, section 1, p. 23; November 17, 1979; May 8, 1981, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Basin and Range; January 24, 1983; April 30, 1984; September 27, 1985.

New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1974; June 22, 1975; November 27, 1977, Edward Hoagland, review of Coming into the Country, pp. 1, 48-51; November 18, 1979, pp. 3, 45; May 17, 1981; January 30, 1983, Michiko Kakutani, review of In Suspect Terrain; May 6, 1984; October 13, 1985; August 6, 1989, Stephen Pyne, review of The Control of Nature, p. 1; December 18, 1994, Harlow Robinson, review of The Ransom of Russian Art, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, January 3, 1977, pp. 12-13; May 18, 1998, review of Annals of the Former World, p. 61; July 23, 2001, review of The Princeton Anthology of Writing, p. 66; August 26, 2002, review of The Founding Fish, p. 57.

Saturday Review, January 22, 1971; April, 1981.

Science, October 30, 1998, Gordon P. Eaton, review of Annals of the Former World, p. 885.

Sewanee Review, fall, 1988, pp. 633-644.

Sierra, October, 1978, pp. 61-63; May-June, 1990, Joan Hamilton, "An Encounter with John McPhee," pp. 50-55, 92, 96.

Technical Communication, November, 1987, p. 296.

Time, June 10, 1974; December 15, 1975; December 5, 1977, Paul Gray, review of Coming into the Country; January 31, 1983; July 6, 1998, John Skow, review of Annals of the Former World, p. 90; November 25, 2002, Lev Grossman, review of The Founding Fish, p. 94.

Times Literary Supplement, February 18, 1983; January 6, 1984; December 7, 1984.

U.S. News and World Report, April 7, 1997, Anna Mulrine, "Prince of Pine Barrens," p. 14.

Washington Post, March 19, 1978, pp. L1, L5-6; December 18, 1979.

Washington Post Book World, August 15, 1971; January 22, 1978; April 19, 1981, Evan Connell, review of Basin and Range; January 20, 1983; March 13, 1983; April 8, 1984; October 13, 1985; November 9, 1986; September 9, 1990; March 7, 1993, T. H. Watkins, review of Assembling California; March 12, 1995, p. 13; March 3, 1996, p. 13.

ONLINE

BookPage.com,http://www.bookpage.com/ (September 14, 2004), Michael Sims, review of Annals of the Former World; Bruce Tierney, review of The Founding Fish.

John McPhee Home Page,http://www.johnmcphee.com/ (September 13, 2004).*