Authors Like Ian Frazier

John McPhee

American · Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), Annals of the Former World (1998)

McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1931 and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965; he has taught non-fiction writing at Princeton since 1974. Coming into the Country is about Alaska and the people who live there. Annals of the Former World, which gathers his four geology books with a final part, “Crossing the Craton”, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

Every book by John McPhee →

Colin Thubron

English · Among the Russians (1983), In Siberia (1999), The Amur River (2021)

Thubron was born in London in 1939. Among the Russians records a 1981 car journey into the Soviet Union, and In Siberia travels the farthest reaches of the former Soviet Union; it won France’s Prix Bouvier in 2010. The Amur River: Between Russia and China was the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year in 2021. He was made a CBE in 2007.

Jonathan Raban

English · Old Glory (1981), Bad Land (1996), Passage to Juneau (1999)

Raban was born in Norfolk in 1942 and died in Seattle in 2023. Old Glory follows his journey down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Bad Land: An American Romance is about immigrant homesteaders in Montana, and Passage to Juneau describes the voyage during which the failure of his marriage became apparent.

Susan Orlean

American · The Orchid Thief (1998), Rin Tin Tin (2011), The Library Book (2018)

Orlean was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1955 and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. The Orchid Thief follows a man charged with taking rare orchids from a Florida swamp, and The Library Book is about the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library. Her memoir Joyride was published in 2025.

Every book by Susan Orlean →

Kathleen Norris

American · Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), The Cloister Walk (1996), Acedia and Me (2008)

Norris was born in Washington, D.C., in 1947 and is a poet as well as an essayist. In 1974 she inherited her grandparents’ farm in Lemmon, South Dakota, and Dakota is about life in that small plains town. In 1986 she became a Benedictine oblate at Assumption Abbey in Richardton, North Dakota, the background to The Cloister Walk.

Peter Matthiessen

American · The Snow Leopard (1978), In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), Shadow Country (2008)

Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927 and died in 2014. The Snow Leopard, about a 1973 Himalayan expedition with the biologist George Schaller, won the National Book Award in 1979. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, on the Leonard Peltier case, drew libel suits from an FBI agent and a former governor of South Dakota; Matthiessen won both. He co-founded The Paris Review in 1953 and later said he had been working for the CIA at the time, using the magazine as cover.

Every book by Peter Matthiessen →

Joseph Mitchell

American · McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (1943), The Bottom of the Harbor (1959), Up in the Old Hotel (1992)

Mitchell was born in Fairmont, North Carolina, in 1908 and joined The New Yorker in 1938, staying until his death in 1996. His pieces on New York’s saloons, waterfront and eccentrics were gathered in Up in the Old Hotel. After Joe Gould’s Secret (1965) he kept going to his office for three decades but published nothing significant again.

Every book by Joseph Mitchell →

S. J. Perelman

American · Crazy Like a Fox (1944), Westward Ha! (1948), The Most of S. J. Perelman (1958)

Perelman was born in New York City in 1904 and died there in 1979. He is best known for the short comic pieces he published in The New Yorker, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s. He co-wrote the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, and won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Around the World in 80 Days. Westward Ha! is a comic account of a trip round the world.

Calvin Trillin

American · U.S. Journal (1971), American Fried (1974), About Alice (2006)

Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1935 and joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1963. From 1967 to 1982 he wrote its “U.S. Journal” series, reporting from across the country. American Fried is about eating in America, and About Alice is a short book about his late wife. He won the Thurber Prize for American Humor for Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin.

Vine Deloria Jr.

Standing Rock Sioux · Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), God Is Red (1973)

Deloria was born in Martin, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Reservation, in 1933 and died in 2005. Custer Died for Your Sins attacked the way outside experts, anthropologists above all, studied and spoke for Native Americans; the American Anthropological Association held a panel in response. His later book Red Earth, White Lies (1995) rejected the Bering land-bridge theory and was criticised by scholars for promoting pseudoscience.