Coming into the Country
John McPhee · 1977
Three long essays about Alaska that constitute McPhee's masterpiece. The wild, the frontier, the bush. The model for place-based literary journalism.
The case against
McPhee refuses to conclude anything; he describes, catalogs, and walks away, which across three long essays starts to feel like evasion dressed as restraint. The middle section, a committee shopping for a new Alaska state capital that was never built, is as dull as its premise. And the 1970s pipeline-era Alaska he documents has half vanished; the reporting now reads as a time capsule.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
