JOHN McPHEE'S LITERARY GEOLOGY

Human interest in rocks goes far beyond science. Rocks rise in our religion, poetry, songs, fiction, history, and psychology. From “The Rock of Ages” to the Rosetta Stone, Plymouth Rock, and Rock n’ Roll, we’ve been thinking about rocks for a long time. Princeton writing professor, John McPhee, has been called “the Duke Ellington of non-fiction.” One of the hot-shot new journalists of the ‘60s and a brilliant contemporary nature writer today, McPhee stumbled upon rocks as a topic for four of his 26 books: Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), Rising from the Plains (1986), and Assembling California (1993). Those books in condensed form with one linking chapter and renamed, Annals of the Former World (1998), won a Pulitzer Prize. This paper will provide road-cut insights into McPhee’s writing style as he writes for the public without sacrificing the science through use of pioneer journals, memoir, travel narrative, dry humor, and geology’s poetic language, as well as his skillful creation of characters from noted American geologists like Ken Deffeys and Dave Love. McPhee describes the “far out” geology of the Far West as “wild, wierdsma, a leather-jacket geology in mirrored shades, with its welded tuffs and Franciscan mélange [and] its strike-slip faults.” The Grand Tetons provide a humorous example of tectonically active mountains as they appear in Hollywood films "from Canada to Mexico, and from Kansas nearly to the coast." His geologists say things like “If I’m going to drive safely, I can’t do geology.” And he claims geology’s poetic language sends “shivers through the bones” and “stir the adolescent groin” with all its swelling up, hardening, uplifting, trusting, slipping, and deflating. As McPhee says, “There seemed, indeed, to be more than a little of the humanities in this subject.” One reviewer of McPhee in American Libraries summarized, “I’ll never read a book about rocks by somebody else.” Reading McPhee may help attract students to the field.