The Strange Case of the Queen-Post Truss: John McPhee on Writing and Reading

Abstract

During last twenty years or so, within shadow of so-called New Journalism and novel, neglected genre of writing has taken on new life. Its practitioners write about traditionally journalistic subjectsverifiable facts of nature, history, society-but they do so with such grace that their efforts have been called journalism, the of fact, or aesthetic nonfictional prose (Schuster). Reminding us that this form has a long and honorable history in our literature (names such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, George Orwell, and James Agee come mind), Ronald Weber proposes useful term nonfiction (1). There are many outstanding contemporary writers of literary nonfiction, but perhaps most widely admired is John McPhee. McPhee's books, says William L. Howarth, have stretched artistic dimensions of reportage (vii). Weber, discussing Coming into Country, writes of McPhee's ability to endow fact with both coherence and odd resonance that belong work of art (121). Elected American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988, McPhee date has published more than twenty books, on what he modestly calls a highly miscellaneous set of topics: Swiss army, birchbark canoes, oranges, nuclear weapons, geology, and many others. Almost all his work appears first in New Yorker, with which he has been associated since 1965. Although we were both long-time McPhee readers, our immediate interest derived from using one of his writings in recent study of reading (Vipond, Hunt, Jewett, and Reither). text was Virgin published in The Talk of Town section of New Yorker. Virgin Forest concerns Hutcheson Memorial Forest, 65 acres of protected woodland near New Brunswick, New Jersey. Other published interviews with McPhee, such as those of journalists Dennis Drabelle and Stephen Singular, are relatively unstructured, employing conventional question-and-answer formats. In contrast, we used same