Author Guide · Literary Nonfiction
Books Written by
John McPhee's first book was about one college basketball player, and his longest was about rocks. He has spent more than half a century at The New Yorker writing about oranges, birchbark canoes, a hybrid airship, the Swiss Army, coal trains and the American shad, and he once rode Interstate 80 across the continent with a geologist to read the road cuts. In 1999 the four geology books, gathered into one volume, won the Pulitzer Prize. This guide covers all thirty-six books in order, how the geology books fit together, and where to start.
By Lisanne Swart · 36 books · Literary nonfiction · 1965–2023 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
John McPhee has published thirty-six books since 1965, from A Sense of Where You Are to Tabula Rasa (2023). Most began as long pieces in The New Yorker, on subjects from citrus growing and bark canoes to nuclear weapons and freight trains. Four of them, on the geology of North America, were combined with a new section into Annals of the Former World (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Where to begin depends on whether you want the landscapes, the people or the craft.
Where to Start with John McPhee
If you want the landscape
→ Coming into the Country (1977).
If you want a world you never thought about
→ Oranges (1967).
If you want people at work
→ Levels of the Game (1969).
If you want the big subject
→ The Control of Nature (1989).
If you write yourself
→ Draft No. 4 (2017).
All 36 John McPhee Books, in Order
A Sense of Where You Are
His first book follows Bill Bradley, then a Princeton basketball star and later a US senator, through practice and games, down to the number of shots he takes before leaving the gym. It grew out of a New Yorker profile.
The Headmaster
A portrait of Frank Boyden, who ran Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for more than sixty years and built it from a struggling country school into a famous one, largely by knowing every boy by name. McPhee had been a student there himself.
Oranges
He set out to write a short piece about orange juice and ended up in the groves, packing houses and research stations of Florida, tracing the fruit's history from China to the frozen concentrate in American freezers. It is the book most often given as proof that he can make anything interesting.
The Pine Barrens
A portrait of the vast, thinly populated pine forest in the middle of New Jersey, the most densely settled state in the country, and of the people who lived there. The book is credited with helping to build support for protecting the region.
A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles
Profiles from his early years at The New Yorker, led by the title piece on Thomas Hoving, who soon afterwards became director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Levels of the Game
One tennis match, the 1968 US Open semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, told shot by shot, with the two players' lives, families and politics folded into every point.
The Crofter and the Laird
McPhee took his family to Colonsay, the small Hebridean island his ancestors came from, and wrote about the crofters who farm it and the laird who owns it.
Encounters with the Archdruid
The conservationist David Brower, head of the Sierra Club, in three set-piece encounters with his opponents: a mineral engineer on a mountain, a resort developer on a coastal island, and the dam builder Floyd Dominy on a raft through the Grand Canyon. It was nominated for the National Book Award.
Wimbledon
A short book on the All England Club and its championships, published with photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt.
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
The story of a small group of engineers in New Jersey trying to build the Aereon, a hybrid aircraft that was part airship and part plane, and the investors and regulators they had to win over.
The Curve of Binding Energy
Travels with the nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor, a former designer of atomic bombs, who argued that nuclear material was guarded so poorly that a small group could build a crude bomb. It was nominated for the National Book Award.
Pieces of the Frame
A collection of shorter pieces, from a search for the Loch Ness monster to Georgia's backroads with a state naturalist.
The Survival of the Bark Canoe
Henri Vaillancourt builds birchbark canoes by hand in New Hampshire, the old way, and McPhee goes with him and his friends on a canoe trip through the Maine woods.
The John McPhee Reader
A selection from his first twelve books, edited by William Howarth, whose introduction on McPhee's working method is still often quoted.
Coming into the Country
Alaska in three long parts: a canoe and kayak trip down the Kobuk River, the search for a site for a new state capital, and a long stay in and around the town of Eagle on the Yukon, among the people who had moved to the bush to live off the land.
Giving Good Weight
Five pieces, including the title essay about selling vegetables at New York's greenmarkets, where McPhee worked a stall himself, and a long one on a proposed floating nuclear power plant.
Basin and Range
The first of the geology books: McPhee travels Interstate 80 with the Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, reading the rocks in the road cuts of Nevada and Utah. It popularised the phrase “deep time”.
In Suspect Terrain
The second geology book, following the geologist Anita Harris through the Appalachians, and her scepticism about parts of the then-new theory of plate tectonics.
La Place de la Concorde Suisse
McPhee follows a unit of the Swiss Army, a militia in which nearly every man serves into middle age, through its training in the mountains.
Table of Contents
A collection that includes his long piece on young country doctors in Maine and one on the biologists tracking black bears in Pennsylvania.
Rising from the Plains
The third geology book, built around David Love, a geologist who grew up on a remote ranch in Wyoming, and his mother's journals of frontier life.
Heirs of General Practice
A short book, first a New Yorker piece, about young family doctors who chose to practise in rural Maine.
Outcroppings
Passages from the geology books paired with photographs of the American West by Tom Till.
The Control of Nature
Three attempts to hold back nature: the US Army Corps of Engineers keeping the Mississippi from switching course into the Atchafalaya, Icelanders pumping seawater onto a lava flow to save a harbour, and Los Angeles fighting debris flows from the San Gabriel Mountains.
Looking for a Ship
McPhee ships out on the Stella Lykes, an American merchant vessel, down the west coast of South America, at a time when the US merchant marine was shrinking fast.
Assembling California
The fourth geology book, with the geologist Eldridge Moores, on how California was pieced together from fragments of ocean floor and drifting land, and why it shakes.
The Ransom of Russian Art
Norton Dodge, an American economist, spent years quietly collecting the work of dissident artists in the Soviet Union and getting it out of the country; McPhee tells how, and what happened to the artists.
The Second John McPhee Reader
A second selection, edited by David Remnick and Patricia Strachan, from the books published since 1975, including the geology books.
Irons in the Fire
Pieces on subjects including the brand inspectors who track cattle in Nevada and the use of geology in criminal investigations.
Annals of the Former World
The four geology books in one volume, with a new section, “Crossing the Craton”, on the old, stable middle of the continent. More than six hundred pages, it took McPhee some twenty years.
The Founding Fish
The American shad, the fish that runs up the rivers of the East Coast every spring, through history, biology and McPhee's own years of fishing for it.
Uncommon Carriers
How things move: McPhee rides with a long-haul truck driver hauling chemicals, on a coal train across the plains, on a towboat on the Illinois River and through a UPS hub in Louisville.
Silk Parachute
A collection of pieces in which McPhee is more present than usual, including the short title essay about his mother.
Draft No. 4
Eight essays on how he works, from structure and dealing with editors to how to get sources talking and what to leave out, drawn from his decades of teaching writing at Princeton.
The Patch
A first half of new essays, including the title piece on fishing for chain pickerel, and a second half of fragments from across his career.
Tabula Rasa
Written in his nineties, a collection of short pieces about the projects he planned and never wrote: people he meant to profile and places he meant to describe.
How Many Books Did John McPhee Write?
Thirty-six books between 1965 and 2023. Counts vary because some lists leave out the two Readers, the photographic books, or the geology books that were later combined.
- The geology books — Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains and Assembling California, later combined in Annals of the Former World. Read the entries →
- Long single subjects — Oranges, The Pine Barrens, Coming into the Country, The Control of Nature, Uncommon Carriers and others. Read the entries →
- Collections of shorter pieces — from Pieces of the Frame (1975) to The Patch (2018). Read the entries →
- On writing — Draft No. 4 (2017) and Tabula Rasa (2023). Read the entries →
In What Order to Read John McPhee
His books are not a series, so you can start anywhere. Two things are worth knowing: if you want the geology, Annals of the Former World contains all four geology books plus a fifth section, so you do not need the separate volumes; and the books on writing read best after you have read some of the work they describe.
A reading path
1. Oranges (1967)
2. Levels of the Game (1969)
3. Coming into the Country (1977)
4. The Control of Nature (1989)
5. Annals of the Former World (1998)
6. Draft No. 4 (2017)
Everything Else John McPhee Wrote: The Full List
Beyond the thirty-six books: a photographic book and an anthology he edited. The books you can actually buy sit at the top of each form.
Open a form with the + to see every book in it.
With photographers
1
1 book · 1981
Alaska: Images of the Country (1981)
Passages from Coming into the Country with photographs by Galen Rowell.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
As editor
1
1 book · 2001
- 2001The Princeton Anthology of Writingpieces by writers who taught at Princeton, edited with Carol Rigolot
Quick facts about John McPhee
- Born
- March 8, 1931, Princeton, New Jersey
- Education
- Princeton University (1953) and Magdalene College, Cambridge
- Before The New Yorker
- Writer and editor at Time, 1957–1964
- The New Yorker
- Staff writer since 1965
- Teaching
- Writing at Princeton since 1975
- Pulitzer Prize
- General Nonfiction, 1999, for Annals of the Former World
- Other honours
- Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1977); George Polk Career Award (2008)
- Popularised
- The phrase “deep time”, in Basin and Range (1981)
- Books
- 36, from A Sense of Where You Are (1965) to Tabula Rasa (2023)
- Main publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux, since 1965
How John McPhee Writes: Structure First
McPhee does not start writing until he knows the shape of the piece. He has described sorting his typed notes into piles and drawing the structure as a diagram before the first sentence, and in Draft No. 4 he reproduces some of those diagrams: a circle, a spiral, a line looping back on itself.
He lets his subjects explain their own world, and he stays in the background. In Encounters with the Archdruid he puts David Brower on a raft with the man who wants to dam the Grand Canyon and mostly lets them talk; in the geology books he travels with a single geologist at a time and lets the science arrive through that person.
He has taught a nonfiction writing course at Princeton since 1975, and many of his former students have gone on to staff jobs at The New Yorker and elsewhere. “Writing is selection,” he tells them in Draft No. 4: what you leave out is a decision as much as what you put in.
Frequently asked questions about John McPhee's books
How many books has John McPhee written?
John McPhee has published thirty-six books, from A Sense of Where You Are (1965) to Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 (2023). Counts vary because some lists leave out the two anthologies of his work or the photographic books.
What was John McPhee's first book?
His first book was A Sense of Where You Are (1965), a profile of the Princeton basketball player Bill Bradley, who later became a US senator.
Which John McPhee book won the Pulitzer Prize?
Annals of the Former World won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1999. It brings together his four books on the geology of North America with a new section.
What are John McPhee's geology books?
Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986) and Assembling California (1993). In 1998 they were combined, with a new section called “Crossing the Craton”, as Annals of the Former World.
Which John McPhee book should I read first?
Oranges (1967) or Coming into the Country (1977) are good places to start. If you want the geology, read Annals of the Former World; if you write yourself, Draft No. 4.
What is Draft No. 4 about?
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017) collects eight essays McPhee wrote for The New Yorker about how he works: structure, editors, interviewing, choosing comparisons, fact-checking, revising and leaving things out.
Is John McPhee still writing?
Yes. His most recent book, Tabula Rasa: Volume 1, was published in 2023, when he was ninety-two.
Footnotes
- John McPhee — Princeton University Program in Journalism
- John McPhee — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Draft No. 4 — review, PopMatters
Bibliography last verified 1 October 2026.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Writing is selection.”
— John McPhee, Draft No. 4 (2017)
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsRead next
