On the Campus - November 17, 1999
Website Exclusives...
John McPhee, awarded the 1999 Pulitzer
Prize for Annals of the Former World
by Julia Boorstin '00
On April 13, 1999, during a break in my Literature of Fact seminar at Princeton University, my professor, John McPhee '53, was told by a department secretary that he had been awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his 2.8-pound collection of writing about geology he has spent the past 20 years on. After the break, he walked back in and continued teaching -- without mentioning the news. For the next hour and a half he joked with the 16 students and critiqued their work. In a bantering dialogue he outlined the structure of a couple of his essays and kept our class 20 minutes late because he had "oh, dear, so much more to tell" us about an upcoming panel of his former students.
The first student to leave the class opened the door to find an eager reporter and a photographer from The Daily Princetonian. The Associated Press was on its way. When the Prince reporter announced the news, asking for McPhee's reaction, the class broke into immediate applause. McPhee adjusted his glasses and seemed more surprised and pleased by our applause than by the fact of the award. The reporter continued asking questions. We students stood, awestruck.
Not long afterward, a woman we didn't know rushed in with a list of reporters' and publishers' phone messages. McPhee introduced his wife, Yolanda, to us, as the woman who he often referred to in his essays. She mentioned their dinner guests for that evening and then rattled off the list of names of those who had called.
McPhee seemed more excited about the Pulitzer that had been awarded to fellow Princeton alumnus Scott Berg '73 for his biography of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.. He seemed surprised that two of his publishers had personally called. The self-declared "company mule" for Farrar, Straus & Giroux said, "I mean, Tom Wolfe has sold a million copies." Yolanda McPhee continued reporting the calls: reporters from Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Washington Post, including David Remnick 'tk and Mark Fisher '80. Yolanda referred to them by name because they had all once been students in this same seminar.
My fellow students and I asked him why he had finished the class, taking an 20 minutes, with no mention of the award. McPhee, with his characteristic pragmatism, explained that it didn't occur to him to tell us the admittedly exciting news because he had so much to cover in the remaining seminar time, and there were only two class meeting left. After almost a semester in McPhee's class this dedication was not out of the ordinary. In addition to holding weekly three-hour seminar, he meets with each student for an hour every other week. We discuss in detail every syntactical and structural choice in our essays. Though McPhee's is one of a few ungraded classes at Princeton, some -maybe most- of us worked harder there than in any other course.
This is the kind of dedication inspired by a writer who considers a seminar outside on a spring day "frivolous" -- not wanting us to be distracted from our studies. He promptly answers students' sometimes daily e-mails of story ideas or unrelated anecdotes, takes class photos to remember each class dynamic and keeps in close touch with a number of alumni each year. It's got to be more than his allegiance to the university he graduated from 46 years ago that motivates this commitment.
When I left the class and walked across campus with some of my classmates, we felt that we had won the Pulitzer. That night I e-mailed him my story idea for our last assignment and reiterated the class' surprise at his low-profile approach to his Pulitzer. He responded within a day and gave me some suggestions for my topic. He noted that he had just told a visiting friend, "I miss them [the class] already." He also wrote: "I get more out of the class than it gets out of me." For a writer so insistent on accuracy, this statement seems as though it could hardly be true.
-Julia Boorstin '00
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