Events

On September 29, more than 60 Cambridge alumni and friends gathered at the Yale Club of New York City for an alumni reception and reading by renowned author John McPhee (Magdalene College 1953). Mr. McPhee read an excerpt from “Season on the Chalk”, an essay which appears in Silk Parachute (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010), his most recent collection of essays. The excerpt took listeners on a delightfully meandering journey over the great chalk landscape of England and onto the South Downs where McPhee introduces Harry Doyne-Ditmas, a close friend and former member of the Cambridge 8 sharpshooters. After the reading, McPhee answered questions about the piece and his writing process and signed books for those in attendance.

Click here to see photos from this event.

John McPhee was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge (1953) and at Princeton University where he is now the Ferris Professor of Journalism. His prolific writing career began at Time magazine in 1957 and led to his long association with the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. One of McPhee's first pieces in the New Yorker, "Basketball and Beefeaters", describes his experience playing on the Cambridge basketball team and the game they nearly played against the Royal Fusiliers at the Tower of London.

McPhee is the author of 28 books, among them Annals of the Former World (1998), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. His most recent book, Silk Parachute, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010.