Nonfiction writers have the same relationship to experience that fishermen have to the sea: success depends completely on what you can pull out of it.
Authors John McPhee
Office of Communications, Princeton University
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Montaigne is a fitting companion for Mr. McPhee, who has the same sort of miscellaneous temperament, the same fascination with odd bits of knowledge.
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The creative person in this process is the reader, by a long shot. The writer supplies three or four words, but the reader makes the picture.
Richard Beck
John McPhee
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…some people think I should be writing with my cudgel. They think that I don’t have the temerity to express these opinions. That’s just the exact reverse of what’s going on. I’m trying to lay this thing out for the reader. Not to take the reader and rub his nose in it, and say, This is how you should think. I want the reader to do his own thinking.
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50 or 100 years hence, will people still be amused by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of exclamation points? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the books of John McPhee.
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John McPhee, a writer who is able to be interesting on almost any subject, is particularly skilled at presenting the dynamics of those complicated conflicting forces. An outdoorsman, romantic but also astute and accepting, he understands the wilderness, he appreciates naïveté, and he also sees who will sell out whom.
John McPhee’s opinions on others
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And when you’re up there, the most impressive thing is the cycles of that world. There aren’t any people up there in that Salmon River valley, not even Eskimos. Cycles of one year, five years, a thousand years: all these different cycles spinning around. The cycles of the wildlife, the different species and how they come and go.
Coming into the Country
Uncommon Carriers
Basin and Range