John McPhee
was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University.  His writing career began at Time Magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965.  The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1969), Levels of the Game (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1972), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975) and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975).  Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science.  
          Since 1977, the year in which McPhee received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Farrar, Straus & Giroux has published Giving Good Weight (collection, 1979), Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), The Control of Nature (1989), Assembling California (1993), The Second John McPhee Reader (1996), Irons in the Fire (1997) and several other works.

[extracted from 1998 brochure]