John McPhee

In 1963, John McPhee wrote his first story for The New Yorker, about his time as a Cambridge University basketball player; he remains a staff writer for the magazine. In a 2010 interview with The Paris Review, he discussed the difficulties a writer faces in pursuing a career. “There is no path,” he said. “If you go to dental school, you’re a dentist when you’re done. For the young writer, it’s like seeing islands in a river and there’s all this stuff you can get into—where do you go?”

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