John McPhee

Author profile

born

March 08, 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey, The United States

gender

male

genre

Nonfiction, Outdoors & Nature, Science

About this author

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John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1968), Levels of the Game (1968), The Crofter and the Laird (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters wit...more

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Books by John McPhee

Average rating: 4.09 · 12,930 ratings · 1,360 reviews · 53 distinct works

	Coming into the Country 4.14 avg rating — 1,354 ratings — published 1977 — 13 editions	My rating:
	Encounters with the Archdruid 4.18 avg rating — 1,300 ratings — published 1971 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Control of Nature 4.18 avg rating — 1,165 ratings — published 1989 — 9 editions	My rating:
	Basin and Range 4.12 avg rating — 788 ratings — published 1981 — 5 editions	My rating:
	Annals of the Former World 4.37 avg rating — 742 ratings — published 1986 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Pine Barrens by John McPhee, James Graves (Illustrations) 4.09 avg rating — 686 ratings — published 1967 — 8 editions	My rating:
	Oranges 4.08 avg rating — 715 ratings — published 1967 — 7 editions	My rating:
	Uncommon Carriers 3.82 avg rating — 690 ratings — 9 editions	My rating:
	Assembling California 4.09 avg rating — 497 ratings — published 1992 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Rising From The Plains 4.18 avg rating — 423 ratings — published 1987 — 7 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by John McPhee

“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”
― John McPhee, Basin and Range

19 people liked it

“If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.
”
― John McPhee

11 people liked it

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”
― John McPhee, Annals of the Former World

tags: everest , geology

6 people liked it

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