Princeton Weekly Bulletin April 19, 1999
McPhee wins Pulitzer for Annals of Former World
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Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee
and wife Yolanda |
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 his 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.
Two dozen books
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).
McPhee was teaching his popular course, The Literature of Fact, when the phone starting ringing across the hall in the Humanities Council Office as wellwishers called to congratulate him on the Pulitzer honor. Cass Garner, the department manager, waited until a scheduled break to give him the news that he had won the prize.
He returned to class but did not tell his students, who only learned of the prize at the end of the seminar, when they ran into a photographer and reporter from The Daily Princetonian waiting outside the door. McPhee explained the significance of the book to his students and smiled when he heard that fellow alumnus A. Scott Berg '71 had won the biography prize for Lindbergh.
As for his own prize, he said calmly, "It's pretty nice."