Pulitzer Prize-winning author to speak at Lehigh

	John McPhee

John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 29 non-fiction works, will come to Lehigh on Thursday, Feb. 22, to read from his library of works and interact with students. The reading, which is free and open to the public, will be at 4:10 p.m. in Whitaker Lab Auditorium.

Widely known as an accomplished writer with a diverse range of interests, McPhee has authored books on Bill Bradley as a Princeton University basketball star (A Sense of Where You Are), the geology of the Plains states (Rising from the Plains), and the role of the shad fishing in early America (Founding Fish).

In a review of his most recent work, New York Times writer Adam Hochschild described McPhee’s collective work as “a great pointililist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people.”

McPhee was born in Princeton, N.J., and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker , where he has been a staff writer since 1965.

In 1999, McPhee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his three-volume series on the geological past of the United States titled Annals of the Former World. His most recent book, Uncommon Carriers , published last year, focuses on freight transportation and the people who inhabit that world, and reflects eight years of field research.

McPhee has won numerous other prizes and many honorary degrees over the course of his career, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominations for National Book Awards.

His reading at Lehigh is sponsored by the Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries, the Science, Technology, and Society program at Lehigh, and the Lehigh University Visiting Lecture Series.

For more information, call (610) 758-3039. More information about John McPhee and his work is available at www.johnmcphee.com.

--Linda Harbrecht