'Draft No. 4' is as lean and punchy as legendary author John McPhee's earlier work
“I am constantly meeting ladies who say 'how lovely it must be to write,'” novelist Patrick White once confided to a friend, “as though one sat down at the escritoire after breakfast, and it poured out like a succession of bread and butter letters, instead of being dragged out, by tongs, a bloody mess, in the small hours.”
If any living American author has faced that bloody struggle in the small hours, it's Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer John McPhee, who began his, has the subtitle “On the Writing Process." It's a short work with a plain white cover, the kind of thing that on first glance looks like the easy, self-indulgent afterthought a laureled writer might produce more or less as an exercise in “late” style.
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