JOHN MCPHEE
John Mcphee by Office of Communications, Princeton University, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1931-
Nationality: American
Literary Periods:
American Confessional Period, 1960-
Postwar Period, 1945-1999
Twentieth Century, 1900-1999
RELATED AUTHORS
- Joan Didion
- Tracey Kidder
- Tom Wolfe
Interviews
- John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3The Paris Review
Nevada
View northeast from the summit of Mount Lewis in Lander County, Nevada taken by Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Essay on the life and works of John McPhee, complete works and suggested reading bibliographies
You may also find helpful...
- Literature Resource Center [DATABASE]Includes entries from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Twayne's Authors Series, and Scribner Writers Series
- Literature Online (LION)Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Find books, essays and journal articles in MLA International Bibliography
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative scholarship on John McPhee from books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers.
You'll also want to check out...
Coming into McPhee country : John McPhee and the art of literary nonfiction (2003) by
John McPhee, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 fornbsp;Annals of the Former World, is considered one of the most distinguished writers of literary nonfiction.nbsp;Coming into McPhee Countrynbsp;is the first comprehensive anthology to address his significant body of work. The first section, 'The Evolving Writer,' examines his work from a biographical point of view, explaining background and influences that affected his development as a writer. The second section, 'McPhee and the Natural World,' focuses on his representations of the natural world and explores his work from the framework of both wilderness and urban environmentalism. The final section, 'The Writerly Challenges of McPhee,' discusses his rhetorical choices in structure and style and demonstrates how his seemingly artless presentation is literary in every sense of the word. Overall, this volume salutes McPhee’s enormous and enormously varying oeuvre and confirms his stature as a major American writer.
Call Number: Bates PS3563.C38875 Z64 2003ISBN: 0874807468
Silk Parachute (2010) by
A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES--IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared inThe New Yorkera decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here-- highly varied in length and theme--McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces are wholly personal. In luminous recollections of his early years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother, deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each piece--on whatever theme--contains somewhere a personal aspect in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about the subject, and eachopens like a silk parachute, lofted skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.
Call Number: Colby AC8 .M268 2010ISBN: 9780374263737
American Nature Writers (1996) by
The Scribner Writers Series has set the standard for literary reference for more than 25 years. In addition to addressing the lives and careers of important writers, the articles discuss the themes and styles of major works and place them in pertinent historical, social and political contexts for today's readers. Novelists, playwrights, essayists, poets, short story writers, and more recently, genre writers in science fiction and mystery, are all expertly discussed in the more than 16 sets comprising this series. The essays in the set combine biography, criticism, and in some cases, original interviews to tell the story of each author. This set includes 70 biographical/critical essays on such writers as Rachel Carson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Gary Snyder and 12 general subject essays.
Call Number: Miller REF PS163 .A6 1996 v.1-v.2ISBN: 0684196921
PRIMARY SOURCES: IN PRINT
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Annals of the Former World (1998) by
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
Call Number: Colby SCIENCE QE77 .M38 1998ISBN: 0374105200
Basin and Range (1981) by Call Number: Colby SCIENCE QE79 .M28 1981ISBN: 0374109141Audio Recording
Narrated by Nelson Runger | Miller Multimedia Area Audioset 299
Coming into the Country (1977) by
Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush. Readers of McPhee's earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into an organic whole. In the course of this volume we are made acquainted with the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the outlook of a young Athapaskan chief, and tales of the fortitude of settlers-ordinary people compelled by extraordinary dreams. Coming into the Country unites a vast region of America with one of America's notable literary craftsmen, singularly qualified to do justice to the scale and grandeur of the design.
Call Number: Miller F910 .M29 1977ISBN: 0374126453
