My favorite non-fiction writer, John McPhee is 80 today.
He writes for The New Yorker and has published more than 30 books, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. His most recent collection of essays is Silk Parachute (March 2010).
His father was a doctor of sports medicine, so McPhee grew up on the Princeton campus knowing, he said, “the location of every urinal and every pool table.” As a kid he spent football games on the field. One day the weather was bad and he was wet, cold, and miserable. He looked up and saw writers in the press box — warm, dry, and comfortable. He decided he would become a writer. He wrote a novel for his senior thesis at Princeton. It wasn’t very good, but he said, “You just don’t sit there and write thirty thousand words without learning something.”
He was rejected by The New Yorker for 10 years before publishing an article there. He said, “I used to paper my wall with rejection slips. And they were not making a mistake.” They made him a staff writer in 1965.
Jim Bouton, pitcher and author of Ball Four, is 72.
Micky Dolenz of the Monkees is 66 today.
Baseball hall-of-famer Jim Rice is 58.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born on this date in 1841. Three times wounded in the Civil War, Holmes survived to become a prominent legal scholar, Chief Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1902-1932. He is considered one of the greatest of the Supreme Court justices.
But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States, Baer v. United States, 249 U.S. 52 (1919).
It amazes me that there are people who have not read McPhee. He has written so well on so many subjects that there surely has to be something for everyone. Basketball, canoeing, geology, the Swiss Army, Alaska, the nuclear balance, energy, even oranges. I think the first thing I read of his was a piece about farmer’s market’s in New York’s outer boroughs, and from that unlikely material I was hooked.
Because you did not include a link to his website, I will. Here.
You’re welcome.