LOOKING FOR A STORY

In the country of John McPhee.

McPhee (born 1931) has been writing about American culture, the changing environment, the history of the planet, and human work and sport for more than 70 years. In countless New Yorker essays and more than 30 books, he has charted a unique way of looking at the earth and its inhabitants. He practically invented eco-criticism, and his style of writing has indelibly shaped what has come to be called creative nonfiction—scientific and social inquiry voiced with personality, and real people limned with all the nuance of a novelist. Rubinton’s book offers McPhee’s fans a complete bibliographical and critical guide to his writings, from his earliest jottings, through years of NPR interviews, to books and essays. Just about everything anyone else has said about McPhee is here, too. Reviewing The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) in the New York Times, Sandra Schmidt Oddo wrote: “John McPhee has an eye and an ear and a typewriter that operate like the camera and full crew of a documentary film study.” In its review of McPhee’s first book, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton (1965), Kirkus Reviews wrote, “Seldom has court psychology been better explained, while revealing at the same time a player’s temperament.” Rubinton’s book also showcases a wealth of images, including photographs of McPhee at home in Princeton, where he was a longtime writing professor (among his students was New Yorker editor David Remnick). It remains to be seen if the book will be a monument to the past or an invitation to the future. But the fact remains that you can still learn to write a sentence from McPhee: Readers can use this book as a guide.

A comprehensive bibliographical and critical account of one of America’s greatest writers of nonfiction prose.