It’s the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey, and considered one of the greatest living literary journalists.
When he was in high school, his English teacher required her students to write three compositions a week, each accompanied by a detailed outline, and many of which the students had to read out loud to the class. Ever since he took that class, McPhee has carefully outlined all his written work and has read out loud to his wife every sentence he writes before it is published.
He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book about the geology of America, Annals of the Former World (1998).
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 10-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”
This week’s New Yorker has an article by McPhee. What’s it about you ask. Who cares, it’s by John McPhee.
A “literary journalist.” That’s what I want to be when I grow up.
John McPhee is one of the four writers I credit with screwing up my writing career. His work is so fascinating and filled with detail that I couldn’t stop reading him. And, after a while, I couldn’t stop trying to write like him. He made stuff interesting that no one would believe was interesting. I got into a period where I saw the beauty of almost infinite detail, but I didn’t have Phee’s writing talent or discerning eye for which details were to include. So I started pitching articles that weren’t sexy and editors stopped buying them, and I wrote articles that general audiences couldn’t wade through, and now I’m not a writer anymore.
I don’t blame McPhee for this, though his work was responsible.
My single favorite piece is Brigade de Cuisine which was in the compliation Giving Good Weight, I think. It’s a profile of a chef so eccentric that he wouldn’t allow his name or the name of the restaurant where he worked to be published. McPhee spent weeks sitting around the kitchen with the chef, and it took three pages to describe how the chef cooked a hamburger. It was brilliant, and I still read it about three times a year just for the sheer joy of it.