McPhee, John (Angus)

(born March 8, 1931, Princeton, N.J., U.S.) U.S. journalist and nonfiction writer. He attended Princeton University. After working as an associate editor at Time (1957–64), he became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1965. His nonfiction covers a wide variety of topics. His first book was on Bill Bradley; places he has written about include New Jersey, Alaska, the American West (several books), and Switzerland; other topics include the citrus industry, aeronautical engineering, the birch-bark canoe, and nuclear terrorism. He has taught journalism at Princeton since 1975. His later works include Annals of the Former World (1998, Pulitzer Prize).

McPhee, John (Angus) (1931– ) writer; born in Princeton, N.J. He studied at Princeton (B.A. 1953) and at Cambridge University, England (1953–54). He worked as a television playwright for Robert Montgomery Presents (1955–57) and as an associate editor for Time magazine (1957–64). In 1964 he became a staff writer for the New Yorker; he also taught journalism at Princeton (1975). His nonfiction books, acclaimed for their cool precision, were usually based on articles written for the New Yorker; they cover a wide variety of subjects—everything from oranges to ecology, from canoemakers to Alaska; in later years he pursued an interest in geology through a series of books beginning with Basin and Range (1981).