Peter Hessler at Literary Hub:
In the spring of 1991, when I was a junior at Princeton, I took John McPhee’s seminar on nonfiction writing. Back then, I was an English major who hoped to become a novelist, and I focused primarily on writing short stories. I had no real interest in nonfiction. I hadn’t published a single word in any campus publication, and I had never considered a career in journalism. But John McPhee’s course was famous for having produced authors, and writing—in the undisciplined, impractical, and insecure dreamworld of a 21-year-old mind—was what I hoped to do someday. So I signed up for the class.
By the time I arrived for the first session, in a beautiful, wood-paneled room on the ground floor of a gothic building called East Pyne Hall, the only piece of John McPhee’s writing that I had ever read was the course description. In retrospect, I find this mortifying. But it was also characteristic of the 21-year-old dreamworld: everything was of the moment; nothing was carefully considered. One might assume that, before taking a course taught by John McPhee, who had been described by The Washington Post as “the best journalist in America,” a student would feel inspired to read a couple of books or maybe even one magazine article by John McPhee. But this idea apparently never occurred to me.
More here.
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