David Remnick on John McPhee

David Remnick has been editor of the New Yorker since 1998 (making him the second-longest-serving editor in the magazine's history, behind William Shawn). Before that, he was a staff writer at the magazine, and before that he was a reporter for the Washington Post. David won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and is also the author of Resurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. Before joining the Post, he was a student at Princeton University, where he took John McPhee’s legendary class called “The Literature of Fact.”

John McPhee, "A Sense of Where You Are." First published in The New Yorker January 25, 1965.

McPhee's conversation with Robert Wright.

In the interview, David Remnick refers kindly to my 2000 book About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. It seems to have gone out of print, but a good library should have it, and used copies pop up now and again.

Photo credit: Princeton University, Department of Communication