In the spring of 1991, when I was a junior at Princeton, I took John McPhee’s seminar on nonfiction writing. Back then, I was an English major who hoped to become a novelist, and I focused primarily on writing short stories. I had no real interest in nonfiction. I hadn’t published a single word in any campus publication, and I had never considered a career in journalism. But John McPhee’s course was famous for having produced authors, and writing—in the undisciplined, impractical, and insecure dreamworld of a 21-year-old mind—was what I hoped to do someday. So I signed up for the class.
By the time I arrived for the first session, in a beautiful, wood-paneled room on the ground floor of a gothic building called East Pyne Hall, the only piece of John McPhee’s writing that I had ever read was the course description. In retrospect, I find this mortifying. But it was also characteristic of the 21-year-old dreamworld: everything was of the moment; nothing was carefully considered. One might assume that, before taking a course taught by John McPhee, who had been described by The Washington Post as “the best journalist in America,” a student would feel inspired to read a couple of books or maybe even one magazine article by John McPhee. But this idea apparently never occurred to me.
Everywhere I went, I heard echoes of East Pyne. Please keep caring on the pieces to come.
As a result, I first became a McPhee reader in the margins of the essays that I submitted for class. He marked every paper in pencil, in a tight left-handed script. He crossed out words, and he drew boxes around phrases, and he inscribed long comments that sometimes ran perpendicular to the text. “You can’t make a silk purse out of this,” he wrote, in response to one of my poorly executed descriptions. Next to a sentence with oddly formal phrasing, he remarked, “This could be said with several pebbles removed from the mouth.” Once, when I used a subject’s name four times in the span of two sentences, McPhee wrote, “Listen to the character’s name thudding like horseshoes. Vary it. Use pronouns here and there.”
Other comments thudded in a way that made horseshoes seem soft:
“This sort of thing is irritatingly repetitive.”
“The incongruity in this line isn’t artful, it’s just awkward.”
“I wish you would listen more critically to the rhythms and sound of the prose.”
“You are extraordinarily repetitive for someone who writes on your level.”
“This is lame cleverness.”
But there were also many instances of praise, when John McPhee wrote in the margins “yes,” or “ah,” or “a fine moment.” At the end of my first paper, the neatly penciled script sent up sparks of encouragement:
“This piece is a pleasure—insightfully imagined and ably wrought… It took care—please keep caring on the pieces to come.”
I realized that it’s possible to write both very well and very badly at the same time. My project was to learn how to do the one without the other, and every two weeks, as part of the course, I had an hour-long one-on-one tutorial with John McPhee in his office, on the top floor of East Pyne. That semester, I finally became a proper McPhee reader: for class, he photocopied sections of his books and talked in detail about various problems he had encountered and decisions he had made. While studying his prose we learned about structure, set pieces, and transitions that felt effortless but, when pulled apart, revealed something else. It took care.
By the end of the semester my writing world had been transformed, and that summer I researched what became my first published article, about going door-to-door in East Moline, Illinois, with a group of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And then I was off—after that, no matter where I lived, in England or China or Egypt, I was always researching, writing, and publishing. Everywhere I went, I heard echoes of East Pyne. Please keep caring on the pieces to come.
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John McPhee has compared the sensation of being a young writer to that of a canoeist floating downstream on a river. There are islands everywhere—to the left, to the right, to the front—and you decide where to stop and how long to stay. Time is moving, like the current, and it flows in only one direction. Poor decisions become costlier as the writer grows older. Lingering on the banks of one island might mean that you skip another, and from a distance it’s hard to tell which of the two is barren.
McPhee has also said, “Don’t look at my career through the wrong end of a telescope.” One of the many pleasures of Looking for a Story is that it helps us orient the scope in the proper direction. We see the full body of McPhee’s work, and we see it in order, thanks to the tireless research of Noel Rubinton. Rubinton seems to have uncovered everything—not just the books and the New Yorker articles, but also the old screenplays and the short fiction and the book reviews. There’s even a chapter titled “Juvenilia,” in which we observe the young writer effectively stepping out of the canoe and setting foot on different islands.
At one point, McPhee seems determined to become a novelist; later he writes five prospective episodes for a television series called Robert Montgomery Presents (two of the scripts were made). Even the byline changes. For a brief spell, in the Nassau Sovereign, it’s Johnny McPhee, and then it becomes John Angus McPhee in The Nassau Literary Magazine.
Rubinton illustrates how, at every stage of McPhee’s long career, certain lodestars shine through. One is a pure love of language. It’s fundamental to the geological writing, where McPhee takes a palpable pleasure in terminology: gabbros, plagiogranites, pillow basalts. The love is also clear in his use of a word like Haligonian, which sounds like a long-lost era when dinosaurs walked the earth and the big trees were kings; but in fact a Haligonian is simply a person from Halifax. Puns are another not-guilty pleasure.
When the Princeton Board of Health shut down local hot dog vendors, the undergraduate McPhee’s report was titled “Imminent Ptomaine.” “Zealous Island” is an account of a political activist detained on Ellis Island. “Phi Beta Football”—those words, which cleverly repeat and refigure three distinct consonant sounds, like a little snatch of jazz, were so pleasing to McPhee’s ear that he used them as a title for four different pieces: first, in 1952, in The Princeton Tiger, and last, in 2014, in The New Yorker. Who says that a writer can’t paddle back to an old island?
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Looking for a Story can be read in different ways. The book traces John McPhee’s lifelong search for material, and often it’s possible to see how one subject or character led to another. But this book will also help McPhee readers find stories that they didn’t know existed, and subjects that might surprise them. For a former student of McPhee’s, one of the many fascinating discoveries is a YouTube link to a video of a February 8, 1952, episode of Twenty Questions, on which McPhee appeared as a contestant. Today, very little of this world of black-and-white television is recognizable. For one thing, the game-show buzzer had apparently yet to be invented, and thus we are treated to the spectacle of five adults eagerly raising their hands in competition, like a pack of fourth graders. McPhee himself, in a light jacket, striped tie, and a full head of hair, is younger than I was when I entered his class. His face is unfamiliar—but every time he answers a question, the voice sounds almost exactly the same as the one I remember from East Pyne Hall.
After I graduated, in 1992, there was a stretch of many years when we communicated primarily through writing, and often on paper. On October 22, 1997, while living in a remote city on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, I mailed a long letter that began “Dear Mr. McPhee.” To me, he was still the professor in the wood-paneled room, and I was often asking for advice. I didn’t know anybody who was more sympathetic and more insightful about what it feels like to be a young writer steering through the rapids. In July of 2000, when I was living in Beijing and trying to juggle the edit of my first book with researching articles for The New Yorker, John sent a note of encouragement. “You are fully able to work on all those levels and should feel confidence about it,” he wrote, and then continued: “Confidence never wrote a book, though, and in excess has killed unborn libraries.” Later that year, he wrote again:
I also remember your saying that you may be in eastern America in a month or so and would like to visit Princeton. I very much hope you do. If you would like to talk about books versus-and-plus New Yorker versus-and-plus whatever else comes to mind, now is a good time to do it, and I’d be pleased to be the sounding board.
Over time, “Mr. McPhee” became John. I lived abroad for more than 20 years, but Princeton was a regular stop on my annual visits back to the United States. As I settled into my writing life, the river became easier to navigate, and I no longer needed to ask John for advice. But every time I returned to campus, I gained a better understanding of what it means to sustain a career in writing nonfiction. For John, that’s another lodestar: his drive and his dedication to the craft have never wavered. He has taught me many lessons, but the first remains the most powerful. Please keep caring on the pieces to come.
There is no higher praise for a work of factual writing than to say that it reads like a John McPhee book.When John was my teacher, he called his course “The Literature of Fact.” At other times, he used the title “Creative Nonfiction.” He’s often remarked on the problems of the various labels for the genre that he prefers to call “factual writing.” Once, in the 1980s, he was asked to give a reading at the University of Utah, but the invitation was subsequently revoked because, as John remembers, “They didn’t approve of the genre I write in.”
Of the 121 authors who have been awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature, only one has specialized in nonfiction: Svetlana Alexievich, a journalist who depicted life during and after the Soviet Union. Even then, the description that was posted on the Nobel website emphasized that Alexievich’s work “moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction.” Once, while visiting John at his home, I remarked that I dislike it when people praise a nonfiction book by saying, “It reads like a novel!” John quickly agreed, which didn’t surprise me: none of his books reads like a novel.
All of them are beautifully written, but they also refer to source materials, and interviews, and the author’s reporting in ways that a novel never would. Everything has to be true; there is no blurring of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. From my perspective, one of John McPhee’s greatest achievements is the way in which he has brought greater respect to his genre. There is no higher praise for a work of factual writing than to say that it reads like a John McPhee book.
*
In April of 2023, I made another journey back to Princeton. These days, John spends little time on campus; in 2020, he decided to retire from teaching, after a career that began in 1975. Over the course of those 45 years, he taught a total of 544 students, of whom 125—nearly a quarter—have published at least one book. In John’s latter years, on several occasions, he taught the child of a former student.
He continues to write, and he’s physically active; every other day, he bicycles hard for exercise. (The year after my visit, in a rare concession to age, he transitioned to using a stationary bicycle.) He describes himself as naturally shy, but his circle of friends, colleagues, and contacts must be among the widest of any nonagenarian on earth. In person he is engaging, good-humored, and quick-witted. He doesn’t look much different from the teacher I remember from 1991. When I visited, we had lunch with his wife, Yolanda, in the home that they have shared since the 1970s. In a typical McPhee detail, he had earlier observed that he was 92 years old, from the Princeton class of ’53, while I was 53 years old, from the class of ’92.
Over lunch, we reminisced about the old days in East Pyne Hall. As always, we also talked about current work: John was editing Tabula Rasa, the most recent of his more than three dozen books, and I mentioned a project that I planned to start soon. Before I left, we took a photograph together in front of his house. The following day, John sent an email. He had already reached out to a couple of friends who might be helpful for my new project, and he included their contact information. They were ready to talk whenever I was ready to call.
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From Looking for a Story: A Complete Guide to the Writings of John McPhee by Noel Rubinton. Copyright © 2025. Foreward copyright © 2025 by Peter Hessler. Available from Princeton University Press.
