Howarth+McPhee+Reader+EB

Evan Bower Howarth- Introduction to the McPhee Reader

In Howarth’s introduction to the McPhee //Reader//, as in our class discussions, he comments on the variety of topics McPhee covers, and the skill with which he tackles all of them. What is interesting is that Howarth points out that while the content of McPhee’s writing should be comparable to that of a classic novelist, the fact that he writes non-fiction makes his body of work much harder to preserve. He points out that while there is one section in a bookstore for fiction, there are separate sections for everything else.

Howarth says, “Yet if McPhee were a novelist, poet, or playwright, his books would all be on the same shelf, in the English Literature section.” This means that while a novelist’s body of work sits beside each other on a bookshelf, McPhee’s work will be dispersed and lost. This hides just how outstanding is the quality and quantity of McPhee’s work. The beauty of //The John McPhee Reader// is that it collects his various works under one title. Howarth adds that, “This label is frustrating, for it says not what a book is but what it is //not.// Since “fiction” is presumably made up, imaginative, clever, and resourceful, a book of “non-fiction” must //not// be any of those things, perhaps not even a work of art.”

Following this is a description of the writing process McPhee enters when approaching a story. An interesting tidbit about McPhee is that he has been a writer from the start. Although he currently writes journalism, he was actually responsible for a change of rules which allowed for “creative thesis’s” to be accepted in place of more traditional essay style thesis in his senior year of Princeton. He did this by submitting his first novel called //Skimmer Burns// instead of the assigned research essay. So although he writes non-fiction, fiction literary tools are not foreign to him.

Closing his essay, Howarth describes how thorough McPhee explores a topic, and just how much he writes before the editing process begins. Howarth writes that, “When he starts to hear a story a third time, McPhee stops interviewing,” to point out that he doesn’t just get the story and run, but stays until the story becomes incredibly familiar to him. The article describes what our class discussions have expected of McPhee and his passion toward his art.