When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

But some of McPhee's most memorable work describes people who work out of the limelight: a builder of birch bark canoes (Henri Vaillancourt) a bush pilot and a French-speaking wine maker in the Swiss army. One of his roommates at Princeton was 1951 Heisman Trophy winner Dick Kazmaier. John Angus McPhee (born March 8 1931) is an American writer widely considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction.

McPhee avoided the streams of consciousness of Wolfe and Thompson but detailed description of characters and appetite for details make his writing lively and personal even when it focuses on obscure or difficult topics. John Angus McPhee (born March 8 1931) is an American writer widely considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. "
Unlike Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson who helped kick-start the "new journalism" in the 1960s McPhee produced a gentler literary style of journalism by incorporating techniques from fiction.