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John McPhee Reader #1

The John McPhee Reader

william l. howarth john mcphee

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The John McPhee Reader, first published in 1976, is comprised of selections from the author's first twelve books. In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are; a decade later, he had published eleven others. His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a journalist whom L.E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, who Geoffrey Wolff said "is bringing his work to levels that have no measurable limit," who has been called "a master craftsman" so many times that it is pointless to number them.

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1976
Series
John McPhee Reader

This edition

Format
416 pages, Paperback
Published
June 1, 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN
9780374517199
ASIN
0374517193
Language
English

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About the author

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john mcphee

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John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

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Rating(4 / 5.0, 60 votes)
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60 reviews All reviews
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AznThing2o6
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 17,2025
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I've been meaning to read McPhee for awhile. Perhaps I should've waited to find a full book by him. It is nice to read a clip of a work by him, and to finish it. It's a bit like reading a magazine. I never would have read about Bill Bradley and the Deerfield headmaster otherwise. Which is good?
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mzpasaway13
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 17,2025
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A terrific place to start, but really this is dipping one's toes. McPhee is a consummate journalist, one of the best I've ever encountered at simply packing each line, paragraph, and piece with valid, juicy information. The man was my gold standard when I wrote Deaf Side Story and remains an idol today.

But it's not just the prose, it's his topics. One could say he is (often) an "environmental" writer, but that's too simple, and misses the mark: what McPhee does so well is to pick the exact focal point within a larger field, be it art of geology, and zero in on what's important.

Not just a "reader," this is a primer on solid, valuable non-fiction.
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Isuspep
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 17,2025
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This volume, originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1976, contains essays and articles written between 1965 to 1976. I couldn't find a paperback edition with the cover that is on the one we have, but I'm pretty sure it is the same book.

I couldn't swear that I read all of the pieces in the book aloud to Maggee, but we certainly read many of them (not in this collection, but in others or in stand-alone volumes)... and very much enjoyed them.

The "Date I finished..." refers not to our original readings but to the date this volume was logged at Goodreads and this copy was added to the BML.
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FrozenSheep
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 17,2025
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Good, entertaining nonfiction. Gets a little dry at times but he is very good at making what he is interested in interesting to others.
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Karma___
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 17,2025
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I love John McPhee's work. It's not a fast read but his work is beautiful and meticulous.
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pistachio20
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 17,2025
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This was Anna's pick for our book exchange. I did not get to read every piece but the ones I did read I liked very much. He has a way of making the mundane seem terribly interesting. My favorites were "The Barrens" and the one about the art museum director, Sorry I can't recall the name of that one at the moment., but it was a fascinating look at a person who is really excellent at his job. I guess that is th genius of McPhee.
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Scifikimmi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 17,2025
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McPhee is ideal for readers who have outgrown Hunter S. Thompson and seen through Tom Wolfe. He is sometimes dragooned into the ranks of the ‘New Journalists’ - wrongly. Unusual for an American writer, McPhee is so self-effacing you wonder whether his shoes even leave footprints. He seems capable of injecting almost subject - canoes, sports, nuclear physics, oranges - with interest, and he writes with an unflashy, quietly stylish grace. This is a collection of excerpts from McPhee’s first twelve books and is perhaps the best introduction to his oeuvre. I rather envy anyone coming to it for the first time.
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