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It's the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931), and considered one of the greatest living literary journalists। He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He once researched his own family tree and traced it back to a Scotsman who moved to Ohio to become a coalminer.


As a high school student, McPhee played a lot of sports, especially basketball। His English teacher required her students to write three compositions a week, each accompanied by a detailed outline, and many of which the students had to read out loud to the class. Since then, McPhee has carefully outlined all his written work, and he has read out loud to his wife every sentence he writes before it is published.


In college, McPhee was a regular contestant on a weekly radio and television program called "Twenty Questions," which he believes taught him to gather facts and guess at their hidden meanings. His goal as a young writer was to write for The New Yorker, but it took 14 years of being rejected before he published his first article there. During those years, he said, "I tried everything, sometimes with hilarious results. I think that young writers have to roll around like oranges on a conveyor belt. They have to try it all."

In 1962, he got a phone call from his father about an amazing new college basketball player at Princeton. McPhee went to see him play and decided to write a profile of the young man, whose name was Bill Bradley. The profile was published in The New Yorker, which invited McPhee to be a staff writer, and the profile became McPhee's first book: A Sense of Where You Are (1965). He went on to become one of the foremost journalists for The New Yorker. His name in the table of contents would actually increase the sales of that issue of the magazine. Then, in the early 1980s, he decided to write a geological history of the United States, based on the roadcuts carved out for Interstate 80. William Shawn wasn't sure readers would be interested in that particular subject, but McPhee didn't care. He spent almost 20 years writing about geology, and in 1999, he won his first Pulitzer Prize for his book Annals of the Former World (1998).

McPhee has published more than 25 books, even though he rarely writes more than 500 words a day. He once tried tying himself to a chair to force himself to write more, but it didn't work. He said, "People say to me, 'Oh, you're so prolific.' God, it doesn't feel like it — nothing like it. But you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart."

When asked what he writes about, McPhee said, "I'm describing people engaged in their thing, their activity, whatever it is."

From The Writer’s Almanac

August of 1965 I got off the train in Cedar Rapids Iowa and a cab took me and my steamer trunk thru the corn fields to Mount Vernon, Iowa.

The bulletin board in the wrestling room at Cornell College had a poster with Bill Bradley’s picture and his quote from McPhee’s book, “When you are not practicing remember that somewhere some else is, and when you meet, he will win.”

This inspired me to practice twice a day, with the team in the afternoon and by myself each morning lifting weights, running, and practicing my wrestling moves in the style I’d learned that summer studying Karate in Denver.

Looking back, the time may have been better spent studying, but it resulted in me winning the NCAA Division III Midwest Conference Championship my sophomore year in 1967: I made a last second take down to beat a senior from Grinnell College, I think it was, who had placed 2nd in the same championship tournament for the last two years, since his sophomore year.

Our Cornell team won the tournament and then spent two days driving to Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania for the national championship where we all went out in our first match, exhausted from the long drive.

My dad surprised me, I looked up in the stands to see him wave at me and for some reason started worrying about where he would stay that night. Tired and distracted, I was outscored and eliminated from the tournament.

Dad and I drove into New York City, stayed at the New York Athletic Club, and went to a night club where I had my first alcoholic drink, since I was finished with athletics, engage to be married, free from the religion I’d been raised with, having wasted two years of my life in the wrestling room practicing instead of studying.

Would Bill Bradley be in contention for the nomination for president of the United States today if he’d focused on his education instead of basketball? I’d like to see 500 words from John McPhee on that in the New Yorker.