John McPhee

John McPhee (born 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey) is an American writer of literary non-fiction, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965 and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Annals of the Former World.

McPhee was educated at Deerfield Academy, Princeton University and Magdalene College, Cambridge, and worked at Time before joining The New Yorker. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published many of his books, including the earliest in his bibliography, A Sense of Where You Are (1965). It was followed by The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), Levels of the Game (1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1970) and Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). His wide range of subjects runs from oranges and the New Jersey Pine Barrens to merchant shipping and geology. Coming into the Country, an account of Alaska published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1977, is his best-selling book. The Control of Nature appeared in 1989.

His geology books Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986) and Assembling California (1993) were gathered with a new section, Crossing the Craton, as Annals of the Former World (1998). Later books include The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2006) and Draft No. 4 (2017), on the craft of writing. He has taught as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton since 1974 and received the George Polk Career Award in 2008.

For collectors

Collectors look for the Farrar, Straus and Giroux first editions, such as A Sense of Where You Are (1965), and for the original single volumes of the geology series alongside the Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World (1998).