American nonfiction author. McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. He began his writing career at Time magazine; since 1965 he has been a staff writer for the New Yorker, which has serialized many of his twenty-nine books. McPhee's output is famously eclectic. His first book, A Sense of Where You Are (1965), profiled then-college basketball player Bill Bradley. His subsequent books include Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), a portrait of Sierra Club founder David Brower; Coming into the Country, a look at life in Alaska; and Annals of the Former World (1998), a tetralogy about geology, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is Silk Parachute (2010). For decades he has taught a creative writing course, The Literature of Fact, at Princeton. See also johnmcphee.com.