was born on this date in 1931. The Writer’s Almanac has this about McPhee:
It’s the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931). He’s the author of over twenty books, and he’s been a staff writer for many years for The New Yorker magazine. In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange growing business, he wrote: “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”
John McPhee won the Pulitizer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1999 with his Annals of the Former World.
McPhee has long been one of NewMexiKen’s favorites.