McPhee, John

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).