The Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
John McPhee

February 12-13, 2007

On February 12, John McPhee read two sections of Uncommon Carriers and a portion of a new work on chalk that was not yet published. Ben Crair, a student in the Writers House Fellows Seminar, gave the introduction. That introduction is here. Widely considered a pioneer of literary nonfiction, John McPhee contributed to the establishment of "new journalism" in the 1960's, which revolutionized traditional nonfiction writing by incorporating techniques from fiction. The author of twenty-nine books, McPhee has most recently published Uncommon Carriers (2006), a sketchbook of the freight transportation industry, The Founding Fish (2002), and Annals of the Former World (1998), a tetralogy on geography which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. Both his Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards and in 1977 McPhee was the recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has contributed to the New Yorker for more than forty years and has taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University since 1975. Having written his way inside the world of art museums, environmental groups, fruit markets, airship factories, basketball courts, the Alaskan wilderness, and atomic-bomb labs, McPhee cultivates his ability to enlarge readers’ understanding of the strange, making it familiar. In The New York Review of Books, Stephen Jay Gould wrote that McPhee “triumphs by succinct prose, by his uncanny ability to capture the essence of a complex issue, or an arcane trade secret, in a well-turned phrase."