John McPhee: Encounters in Wild America (LOA #398) The Pine Barrens / Encounters with the Archdruid / The Survival of the Bark Canoe / Coming into the Country

By: John McPhee

Published by Library of America, 2026-03-31

A Pulitzer Prize winner takes you on unforgettable adventures to some of America's most wild places in this deluxe collection of 4 classic books of nature writing

From legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, here are four adventures in wild places. Exploring these untamed regions and the characters, skills, and ways of living they have fostered, McPhee quietly registers the costs of growth and progress and finds pleasure in what remains.

• The Pine Barrens (1968), finds McPhee traversing the byways of an unexpected near-wilderness—the New Jersey Pine Barrens—with it's unusual dwarf forests, cedar swamps, and tannin-brown creeks a world apart from the sprawling megalopolis that surrounds them.
• Encounters with the Archdruid (1971) recounts three trips, hiking and rafting, through pristine ecosystems in Washington's Cascade Mountains, off the Georgia coast, and down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Along the way, McPhee’s expert companions—a mining engineer, resort developer, and dam builder among them—challenge the "archdruid" of the book's title, the environmentalist David Brower, to defend his efforts to keep them "forever wild."
• The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975) follows New Hampshire Canoe builder Henri Vaillancourt as he crafts a new vessel out of birch Bark, using the age old tools and methods of the American Indians. McPhee then joins Vaillancourt and others on a grueling, tense 150-mile test voyage through a Maine woods full of hauntingly beautiful prospects and potential peril.
• Coming into the Country (1977) is McPhee’s magisterial composite portrait of Alaska and Alaskans. Here, as he crisscrosses this vast and sublime state, are Natives and newcomers; government officials, gold miners, and oilmen; wildlife ecologists, rugged outdoorsman, and bush pilots; and much more

Edited by current New Yorker chief David Remnick and prepared with McPhee’s assistance, the volume includes a newly researched chronology of the author's life, detailed notes, and index, and all of the illustrations that accompanied the original editions.