15 Facts About John McPhee

John Angus McPhee was born on March 8,1931 and is an American author.

John McPhee is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction.

John McPhee 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.

Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

John McPhee has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for most of his life.

John McPhee was born in Princeton, the son of the Princeton University athletic department's physician, Harry McPhee.

John McPhee was educated at Princeton High School, then spent a postgraduate year at Deerfield Academy, before graduating from Princeton University in 1953 with a senior thesis titled "Skimmer Burns" and spending a year at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

John McPhee was a member of University Cottage Club while a student at Princeton.

John McPhee's writing career began at Time magazine, and led to a long association with the weekly magazine The New Yorker from 1963 to the present.

Unlike Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, who helped kick-start the "new journalism" of the 1960s, John McPhee produced a gentler, more literary style of writing that more thoroughly incorporated techniques from fiction.

John McPhee avoided Wolfe's and Thompson's stream-of-consciousness style, using detailed description of characters and vivid language to make his writing lively and personal, even when it focused on obscure or difficult topics.

John McPhee is highly regarded by fellow writers for the quality, quantity, and diversity of his literary output.

John McPhee has profiled a number of famous people, including conservationist David Brower in Encounters with the Archdruid, and the young Bill Bradley, whom John McPhee followed closely during Bradley's four-year basketball career at Princeton University.

John McPhee has been a nonfiction writing instructor at Princeton University since 1974, having taught generations of aspiring undergraduate writers as the Ferris Professor of Journalism.

John McPhee has received many literary honors, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, awarded for Annals of the Former World.