John McPhee: Encounters in Wild America (LOA #398) (2026)

By John McPhee

A Pulitzer Prize winner takes you on unforgettable adventures to some of America's most wild places in this deluxe collection of 4 classic books of nature writing From legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, here are four adventures in wild places. Exploring these untamed regions and the characters, skills, and ways of living they have fostered, McPhee quietly registers the costs of growth and progress and finds pleasure in what remains. The Pine Barrens (1968), finds McPhee traversing the byways of an unexpected near-wilderness—the New Jersey Pine Barrens—with it's unusual dwarf forests, cedar swamps, and tannin-brown creeks a world apart from the sprawling megalopolis that surrounds them. Encounters with the Archdruid (1971) recounts three trips, hiking and rafting, through pristine ecosystems in Washington's Cascade Mountains, off the Georgia coast, and down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Along the way, McPhee’s expert companions—a mining engineer, resort developer, and dam builder among them—challenge the "archdruid" of the book's title, the environmentalist David Brower, to defend his efforts to keep them "forever wild." The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975)…

Published

2026