Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of March 8th
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It is the 67th day of the year, leaving 298 days remaining in 2022.
On this day in 1931, the author and naturalist John McPhee was born.
McPhee wrote detailed and lengthy magazine articles and books that told the stories of people and places with what are now called "deep dives" -- well researched and documented tales on a singular subject.
He is known for a literary and narrative style, using vivid descriptions and portrayals of the characters he had met during his research.
For more than a half-century, McPhee wrote for The New Yorker, and was the author of dozens of books, many adapted from those articles. He has written on topics from a history of shad in American, to a profile of Bill Bradley during his playing days at Princeton, before an NBA career and life as a U.S. senator.
He won a Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction for Annals of the Former World, a five-volume collection on the geological history of North America. It is based on his road trips through the continent over a span of 20 years, and tells the story of how and why the continent's features developed and aged.
He is also the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University since 1975.
McPhee's first book, published in 1965, was A Sense of Where You Are, about Bradley. Since then, he has profiled people -- the headmaster of a college prep school, and a conservationist; places -- the state of Alaska, and the pine barrens of central New Jersey; and things -- oranges, and the craft of making birch-bark canoes.
McPhee still lives in Princeton, N.J., where he was born and raised.
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