John McPhee (Author)

John McPhee

John Angus McPhee (born March 8, 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey ) is an American non-fiction author .

Life

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1931. He studied at Princeton University and at the University of Cambridge , (UK). He worked for television for two years before starting to write for Time in 1957 . Since 1965 he has been employed by The New Yorker as a journalist . In the same year he published his first of around thirty books, A Sense of Where You Are . At Princeton University he gave writing courses until 1975, one of his students was Richard Preston . He has won several prizes for his books , and in 1999 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book Annals of the Former World on the geology of North America . It consists of a compilation of four previously published books ( Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), Assembling California (1993)) and a final part, Crossing the Craton . His book The Curve of Binding Energy , originally a series of articles published in 1973 by the New Yorker , portrays the developer of the hydrogen bomb, Theodore B. Taylor .

Awards

• Nominated for the National Book Award in the Science category with Encounter With the Archdruid 1972
• Nominated for the National Book Award in the Science category for The Curve of Binding Energy 1975
• Academy Award for Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1977
• Woodrow Wilson Award 1982
• Admission to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988
• John Burroughs Medal for The Control of Nature 1990
• Admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993
• Pulitzer Prize in the non-fiction category for Annals of the Former World 1999
• Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017

Works

• The watchful peace of Switzerland. ( La place de la Concorde Suisse ) Benziger, Zurich, Cologne 1984. ISBN 3-545-34042-2
• Cargo. ( Looking for a Ship ) Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1993. ISBN 3-608-91300-9
• Exchange of blows: the levels of the game. ( Levels of the Game ) Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1994. ISBN 3-608-91303-3
• Oranges. ( Orange ) Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1995. ISBN 3-608-91301-7
• Contraband: the art in a suitcase or the rescue of Russian contemporary art. ( The Ransom of Russian Art ) Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996. ISBN 3-608-91790-X
• The Curve of Binding Energy , 1973, Noonday Press 1990
• Annals of the Former World , Farar, Straus and Giroux 1998

Web links

• Literature by and about John McPhee in the catalog of the German National Library
• Employee biography at The New Yorker .
• Profile of his publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux.