John McPhee is an acclaimed journalist and writer of nonfiction works covering an incredible variety of topics.  He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for his Annals of the Former World, a tetralogy on geology. 

He was born in 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey and graduated from Princeton University and went on to study at Cambridge University.  He began his career with Time magazine and moved to the New Yorker in 1965. Mr. McPhee continues to this day as a staff writer for the New Yorker, while also writing 27 books over the last forty years.

His most recent book Uncommon Carriers is a result of his spending eight years traveling with and talking to workers in the freight and logistics industry.  Uncommon Carriers is a classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.  Among McPhee's best known books is his Coming into the Country, a long work about Alaska that many regard as the best single book about that state ever published. Although he has written many books on various subjects, his abiding interest has been on the subject of geology in general and on the geology of the United States in particular. In fact, he has written so many books on this subject that he is doubtless the outstanding lay authority on geology in this country.  Many of the geology-related books like Basin and Range (on the geological formation of the state of Utah, Assembling California, and Rising from the Plains deal with the American West.

Click here to see what John McPhee works held by Escondido Public Library.

On the Web

• John McPhee's official website
   
• NPR (June 2006), Howard Berkes interview with John McPhee.

See More Author Spotlights

Escondido Public Library.
 Revised: 07/03/08.