Not one of his book jackets has ever carried an author photo. McPhee describes himself as “shy to the point of dread.” He is allergic to publicity.
#BEAN BATTLES PROFILE SERIES#
(“At any location on earth, as the rock record goes down into time and out into earlier geographies it touches upon tens of hundreds of stories, wherein the face of the earth often changed, changed utterly, and changed again, like the face of a crackling fire.”) He has now published 30 books, all of which are still in print - a series of idiosyncratic tributes to the world that, in aggregate, form a world unto themselves. In 1999, McPhee won a Pulitzer Prize for his 700-page geology collection, “Annals of the Former World,” which explains for the general reader how all of North America came to exist. He once wrote an entire book about oranges, called, simply, “Oranges” - the literary cousin of Duchamp’s urinal mounted in an art museum. Literature has always sought transcendence in purportedly trivial subjects - “a world in a grain of sand,” as Blake put it - but few have ever pushed the impulse further than McPhee. His mind is pure curiosity: It aspires to flow into every last corner of the world, especially the places most of us overlook. McPhee has built a career on such small detonations of knowledge. These were things I had not known about a structure that is visible from my house, that I look at every day of my life. The incline railway was, indeed, designed by the Otis Elevator Company, with an average incline of 65 percent - in its heyday, it was one of the steepest railways of its kind on earth. “The machine will be telling you what to do.”Īs soon as we said goodbye, I checked McPhee’s facts. McPhee kept going for a few seconds, suggesting another road or two, but finally he gave up. Then he started giving me directions - 87, 287, Route 1 - until eventually I admitted that I was probably just going to follow the directions on my phone. “A railroad created by the Otis Elevator Company. Hikers stop and gawk and wonder what the thing was like. The picnic party rode to the top, McPhee said, on the incline railway, an old-timey conveyance that has been out of operation for nearly 40 years, and which now marks the landscape only as a ruin: abandoned tracks running up a scar on the mountain’s face, giant gears rusting in the old powerhouse at the top. He proceeded to tell me a story of the time he had a picnic at the top of our local mountain, with a small party that included the wife of Alger Hiss, the former United States official who, at the height of McCarthyism, was disgraced by allegations of spying for the Russians. “I’ve been there,” McPhee said, with the mild surprise of someone who has just found a $5 bill in a coat pocket. I told him the name of my town, about 100 miles away. He was going to give me driving directions. I was calling to arrange a visit to Princeton, N.J., where McPhee lives and teaches writing. McPhee is now 86 years old, and each of those years seems to be filed away inside of him, loaded with information, ready to access. When you call John McPhee on the phone, he is instantly John McPhee.