John McPhee’s Timeless Writings on America’s Wild Lands: A Definitive Collection

What do oranges, deep time, and the Swiss Army have in common? Very little—except John McPhee. Over his decades-long career, the nonfiction master has written about an extraordinary range of subjects for The New Yorker, later collected into dozens of books by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This year, he turns 95.

Yet one theme recurs throughout his work: the nature and fate of American wilderness. Several of his most celebrated books recount journeys into untamed places—near Glacier Peak in Washington, through the North Woods of Maine, down the Salmon River in Alaska—and profile individuals striving to survive in landscapes most readers might overlook, such as the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

Four of these books—The Pine Barrens (1968), Encounters With the Archdruid (1971), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), and the widely regarded masterpiece Coming Into the Country (1977)—have now been collected by the Library of America in a single volume titled John McPhee: Encounters in Wild America.

McPhee’s Rejection of the ‘Environmental Writer’ Label

McPhee has consistently rejected the “environmental writer” label. In an interview with The Paris Review, he stated:

“I’m a writer who writes about real people in real places. End of story.”

Yet this new collection underscores his significance as a foundational voice in modern environmental literature, which flourished alongside the environmental movement of the 1960s. Much of this writing carries an elegiac tone—a lament for what has been lost and a warning of what may vanish if action is delayed.

Wilderness as Contested Territory

McPhee’s “wild America” books reflect this tension. In them, his subjects voice grim predictions about a future “fifty or more years hence”—a future that is now our present—where dams and jetports threaten to erase entire landscapes. McPhee traveled to the Pine Barrens because, as he wrote, “I found it hard to believe that so much unbroken forest could still exist so near the big Eastern cities, and I wanted to see it while it was still there.” The planned supersonic jetport never materialized, sparing the region from development.

Alaska tells a different story. Reading Coming Into the Country today, it’s impossible to ignore the references to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which began pumping oil from Prudhoe Bay to the Valdez Marine Terminal on June 20, 1977. McPhee’s book serves as a final dispatch from a land on the brink of irreversible change.

Wild America as a Battleground

With unmatched clarity, McPhee reveals how “wild America” is a contested space—subject to ongoing, and perhaps unresolvable, disputes over its future. Coming Into the Country and its companion volumes stand as both celebration and elegy for a vanishing world.