John McPhee Finds His Unending Project
In November 2010, a century after Mark Twain died of a heart attack at age 74, the University of California Press published the first volume of his unexpurgated autobiography. To the surprise of everyone but Twain himself—he had insisted on the 100-year cooling-off period so he could “speak thence freely”—hundreds of thousands of readers were waiting. Clocking in at nearly 800 pages of dictated reminiscences and scholarly addenda, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 blew past its planned initial print run of 7,500 copies and kept on going until more than a quarter million doorstoppers were out the door. Still, booksellers struggled to keep it in stock for the holidays. “It’s totally the dad book of the year,” one of them informed The New York Times.
has four daughters—all of them, McPhee’s 34th book of finely wrought “factual writing.” (He prefers the term to , of which he once told the : “What the hell, that just says, this is a nongrapefruit we’re having this morning. It doesn’t mean anything.”)
