For enthusiasts of literary non-fiction, the name John McPhee resonates with a particular reverence. A friend once mentioned the term “McPhino,” coined in America for acolytes of this writer, and while it might sound like a quirky burger, it accurately captures the devoted following McPhee has cultivated over decades. As a long-time admirer, I proudly embrace the label and delve into what makes John Mcphee Books so compelling and enduring.
My own journey into McPhee’s world began with Oranges (1967). Even then, his unique ability to extract captivating narratives from seemingly mundane subjects was evident. This wasn’t just a book about oranges; it was a meticulously crafted exploration of the fruit’s history, cultivation, and cultural significance, tracing its path from ancient China to the modern citrus industry of Florida. From Oranges, I ventured into the complexities of nuclear physics with The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) and philosophical considerations of value and conservation in Encounters With the Archdruid (1971).
A common observation among McPhinos is his knack for making intricate subjects accessible and engaging. However, to simply say he makes “gnarly subjects compelling” understates his artistry. His work is a form of literary experimentalism, akin to the Oulipo school, where he sets himself deliberate creative constraints. The challenge, it seems, is to transform the ostensibly ordinary into something extraordinary. Whether it’s the life cycle of the shad in The Founding Fish (2002), the craftsmanship of traditional bark canoes in The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), or the intricacies of trucking and train driving in Uncommon Carriers (2006), McPhee consistently succeeds in crafting books that are both deeply informative and utterly captivating.
The sheer breadth of John McPhee books is another delight for his readers. His diverse subject matter ensures that his work often intersects with your current interests. While researching Mountains of the Mind in 2002, an American editor urged me to read McPhee’s “stone books”—his Pulitzer Prize-winning series on geology and geologists, later compiled as Annals of the Former World (1998). These books became my guide to writing about the vast timescale of geological time. Later, when I began exploring the concept of wildness, I naturally gravitated towards what many consider McPhee’s magnum opus, Coming into the Country (1977). This book, exploring Alaska, remoteness, the frontier myth, and conflicting land use philosophies, became a national bestseller upon release.
Trans-Alaska Pipeline: A symbol of development and environmental impact discussed in John McPhee’s books about Alaska.
Coming into the Country was not an easy book for McPhee to write. He confessed in a Paris Review interview, “When I wrote [it], I was sitting up in an office I used to have in Nassau Street… and I stewed like hell. My walls were covered in bulletin boards with three-by-five cards and maps of Alaska and everything else. I’d go in there and try to advance this piece… So I started thinking, if I ever finish this piece, I’m not going to write another word!”
Despite the struggle, he not only finished the “piece” but expanded it into a series of articles and ultimately a book. And, of course, he continued to write prolifically. Knowing that even a writer of McPhee’s caliber could “stew like hell” is both reassuring for aspiring writers and further testament to the book’s achievement. There’s no trace of that struggle in the final product. McPhee describes Alaskan rivers as “gin-clear,” and his prose mirrors that clarity. From the opening paragraphs, the reader is effortlessly carried along by a style so transparent that it becomes almost invisible as a medium, allowing the narrative to flow unimpeded.
Coming into the Country is essentially three books interwoven into one. The first part recounts a 1975 river journey McPhee undertook in the Brooks Range of Alaska with a group assessing the area’s wilderness character. The second section explores “urban Alaska” and the then-relevant debate about the state capital’s location—should it remain in Juneau, move to Anchorage, or be established anew? The longest section is a rich tapestry of vignettes depicting the inhabitants of Eagle, a small town near the Canadian border in eastern Alaska, and the surrounding wilderness. These are resilient individuals, many of them former marines, oil workers, gold prospectors, and fur trappers, who have “come into the country” and proven their mettle by surviving in the Alaskan wilderness.
These seemingly disparate sections are unified by recurring themes: perceptions of wilderness, the tension between conservation and development, the interplay of law and landscape, and Alaska’s profound distinctiveness. McPhee aptly describes Alaska as “a foreign country significantly populated with Americans,” a characteristic one-liner that exemplifies the book’s many memorable phrases.
The river journey in the first section powerfully evokes this sense of apartness. While McPhee avoids simplistic definitions of wilderness, he is keenly attuned to the awe-inspiring force of nature in its most untamed forms. His prose in these early chapters captures this “rugged, essentially uninvaded landscape covering tens of thousands of square miles—a place so vast and unpeopled that if anyone could figure out how to steal Italy, Alaska would be the place to hide it”—another striking example of his descriptive prowess.
McPhee’s sentences are products of meticulous observation and patience. He seems to possess the visual acuity of a peregrine falcon and the auditory precision of a dictaphone. He notices everything: “lovely young aspen” trees bent by the wind, “their leaves spinning like coins,” or the detailed anatomy of grayling, fish whose “dorsal fins fan up to such a height that [they] are scale-model sailfish.” He calmly documents the dynamism of Alaskan nature, as illustrated in this beautifully paced passage:
Looking up from dinner, we saw a black bear, long and leggy, crossing a steep hillside at a slow lope. It stopped to graze for a time and then, apropos of nothing, suddenly ran and took a crashing leap into a stand of willow and alder, breaking its way through, coming out the other side on to a high plain of pale-green caribou moss.
It’s worth considering McPhee’s own presence in his narrative. As a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker, discretion and the ability to blend into the background are crucial skills. Unlike the flamboyant styles of gonzo journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson, McPhee’s approach is understated. Yet, in Coming into the Country, subtle glimpses of the author emerge, gradually forming a portrait. He is portrayed as wilderness-savvy, comfortable with silence, physically robust, invigorated by nature, an avid fisherman, uncomplaining, good-humored, valuing self-reliance, appreciating male camaraderie, respecting data, and, notably, deeply afraid of bears.
Travel writing originates from notebooks and field journals. Certain passages in Coming into the Country feel as if lifted directly from McPhee’s moleskine, still bearing the graphite imprint. Consider the opening of an early section: “7am, and the water temperature is forty-four, the air fifty-six, the sky blue and clear—an Indian summer-morning, August 18, 1975.” Time, temperature, weather, month, day, year—a date-stamped instant. The sentence embraces anachronism because the prose that follows is so intensely vivid. McPhee writes in the moment, making his writing timeless. Reading such prose is not stepping into a faded photograph but being transported into immediate clarity.
This clarity stems partly from McPhee’s factual precision. David Remnick observed that McPhee’s non-fiction emulates the “freedom” of fiction but not its “license,” underscoring his commitment to accuracy and metrics. He encounters wolf tracks in river mud, “seven inches long” from heel to claw: “amazing size, but there is a tape measure in my pocket and that is what it says.” Wolf prints are measured, and the silt content of a glacial torrent is quantified: “At the height of the melting season, something near two hundred tons of solid material will flow past a given point on the river bank in one minute.” Coming into the Country is packed with astonishing detail. At times, one might wonder if this heavy cargo of detail will prevent the narrative from taking flight. Yet, the story always soars, gracefully lifting above the details.
This lift is also due to McPhee’s masterful storytelling. At his best, he rivals Lydia Davis or Ernest Hemingway in the art of the micro-narrative. Consider this vignette from a small town near Denali, a base for mountaineers attempting the challenging summit:
I once saw a Japanese climber in Richard and Dorothy Jones’s store there, buying a cabbage. It was a purple cabbage and somewhat larger than his own head, which was purple as well, in places, from contusions and sunburn, and probably windburn, suffered in his bout with the mountain. On his cheek was a welted wound, like a split in a tomato. Leaving the store, he walked out of town, ate his cabbage, and slept it off in a tent.
This 80-word gem is expansive in its omissions, perfected by its final sentence. How does McPhee know the climber’s fate with the cabbage? We trust that he does, given his meticulous fact-checking, evidenced by measuring wolf prints and facing rigorous fact-checkers. He must have verified the climber’s story. The result exemplifies what William Fiennes aptly calls “the golden detail rescued in unfussy language.”
It has been four decades since McPhee’s canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range, chronicled in “The Encircled River,” the first section of Coming into the Country. McPhee recognized he was writing during a pivotal moment in Alaskan history. The Prudhoe Bay oil strike occurred in 1968, followed by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, which drastically altered native societies and paved the way for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. In 1977, the year of the book’s publication, the first oil flowed through the pipeline. Kaufmann, the wilderness-loving federal assessor central to the first section, understood the impending changes. He passionately advocated for preserving vast Alaskan wilderness “for the future of the future,” urging, “It’s not sufficient just to set aside sights to see… we need whole ecosystems, whole ranges, whole watersheds… We’re going to have to live in close harmony with the Earth. There’s a lot we don’t know. We need places where we can learn how.”
“The question now,” he posed, gesturing to wild Alaska, “is what is to be the fate of all this land?”
Forty years later, we can offer partial answers. Prudhoe Bay is now North America’s largest oil field, spanning over 86,000 hectares. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline has transported over 16 billion barrels of oil. Alaska’s population has nearly doubled, exceeding 730,000. The world’s largest zinc mine operates west of the Brooks Range. Climate change, partly fueled by North Slope oil, is melting permafrost and diminishing Arctic sea ice. Consequences include the opening of the Northwest Passage, new oil exploration frontiers, and a drastic decline in polar bear populations. “As the sea ice goes, so go the bears,” a report concluded, predicting a two-thirds reduction in the global polar bear population by mid-century.
Despite these changes, vast stretches of the Brooks Range remain uninhabited and undeveloped. The Salmon River, where McPhee paddled, lies entirely within Kobuk Valley National Park, established in 1980 by the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Kobuk, roadless and remote, is among North America’s least visited national parks.
Coming into the Country now reads as both prophecy and elegy, a boreal classic that stands as a memorial to and testament of the awe-inspiring complexity of America’s “ultimate wilderness.” It is a testament to the power of John McPhee books to illuminate the world around us with unparalleled clarity and depth.
Coming into the Country is reissued by Daunt.
