United States
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Originally published in 1968, The Pine Barrens is republished on the occassion of its 50th anniversary with a foreword by Iain Sinclair.
New Jersey is one of the most densely populated US states, but, unknown to many, it is also home to a vast forest of pines, oaks and cedars almost identical in size to the Grand Canyon.
This is the Pine Barrens. People tend to think of New Jersey as a suburban thoroughfare, yet huge sections of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. Beneath its sandy soil lies an immense natural reservoir of soft pure water, while amongst the trees grow millions of wild blueberry and cranberry bushes.
With his customary curiosity, McPhee sets out to map this mysterious landscape. He retraces its history and meets the 'pineys', the often misunderstood people who call the pines home. One resident can navigate the dense woods by sheer memory, and another responds to McPhee's knock on his door with a pork chop in one hand, a raw onion in the other, and the inimitable greeting, 'Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in.'
The Pine Barrens is a compelling portrait of a place and its people, and a celebration of a rare wilderness in America's increasingly urban landscape.
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. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
"McPhee's genius is that he can write about anything."
– Robert Macfarlane
"McPhee is a grand master of narrative non-fiction."
– Guardian
"Whatever he writes about, McPhee manages to make it not just accessible but fascinating."
– Scotsman
"Proves that factual writing can be as "creative" as any novel."
– New Statesman
"His mind is pure curiosity: It aspires to flow into every last corner of the world, especially the places most of us overlook."
– New York Times
"John McPhee remains without peer. To our good fortune he revels in a universe full of things to understand, and there is nobody better at sharing that joy with his readers."
– Washington Post
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