John McPhee's Non-Memoir

In recent years, the writer John McPhee has stepped away from lucidly detailing complex structures like rocks and lacrosse plays, and has instead taken himself — and his 55 years working for the New Yorker — as his subject. In a series of essays that were collected in the book “Draft No. 4” (published in 2017), McPhee wrote about his handshake book contracts with publisher Roger Straus and trying to get a banished obscenity past Robert Gottlieb and into the pages of the New Yorker. But more than anything, McPhee was writing about writing, and the very particular, sometimes arduous way he goes about reporting, organizing and, most importantly, structuring his stories (using the wildly outdated Kedit “text editor” he has worked on since 1984).