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John McPhee and his wife
Yolanda
(photo by Laura Eichhorn '02 for the
Daily Princetonian)
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When John McPhee, Ferris Professor of
Journalism, started Annals of the Former
World, he thought he would write it in a year.
Twenty years and many books later, he finished the
geological tour along Interstate 80 that received
the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The
Pulitzer Prizes, which honor achievement in
literature, the arts and journalism, are awarded
annually by Columbia University.
McPhee admitted he might
not have started his project had he known how long
it would take. Yet once he started the research,
inspired by an assignment for the New Yorker on the
Alaskan gold rush, he kept going. "The architecture
of this book was in place for 20 years," he
explained. Although some of the material was
previously published as separate books (Basin
and Range, The Suspect Terrain, Rising From the
Plains and Assembling California),
McPhee updated it all for Annals, which was
published in 1998. "The science doesn't stand
still," he pointed out.
A member of the Class of
1953, McPhee has taught at Princeton as Ferris
Professor since 1975. He is the author of two dozen
nonfiction books on topics ranging from Princeton
basketball star Bill Bradley '65 (A Sense of
Where You Are, 1965) to The Survival of the
Bark Canoe (1975) and The Ransom of Russian
Art (1994).
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