
Built to Last
JOHN MCPHEE WAS BORN in Princeton, New Jersey, attended Princeton High School and Princeton University (class of 1953), and raised his four daughters in Princeton. He lives and works in Princeton to this day, practicing the craft he learned in New York—at Time magazine, where he spent seven years, and at the New Yorker, where he’s been a writer on staff since 1965. The Patch is his thirty-third book overall. It takes in the whole arc of his long career, assembling recent essays and previously uncollected pieces dating back to the ’50s, and is McPhee’s second victory lap in a row, if we include