The Pine Barrens

John McPhee

Apr 2011 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

Most people think of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Yet in the low center of the state is a near wilderness, larger than most national parks, which has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens.

The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of one kind or another have gradually moved in, so that now the central and integral forest is reduced to about a thousand square miles. Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. The few people who dwell in the region, the "Pineys," are little known and often misunderstood. Here McPhee uses his uncanny skills as a journalist to explore the history of the region and describe the people—and their distinctive folklore—who call it home.

Ratings and reviews

One of Pulitzer winner John McPhee's liveliest examples of creative non-fiction, THE PINE BARRENS extols the many virtues of rural southern New Jersey--about which most people know nothing--peeling back the overstory to detail life beneath the Pinelands canopy, its rich history and culture, unique geography and environment, and issues threatening the region. Though chockfull of detail, Mr. McPhee's prose builds in the reader a genuine concern for the future of the bucolic forests of pitch-pines and a nostalgia for simpler times, when a man really was as good as his word.  I'm so glad my great-grandmother read it to me when I was a small boy and that I picked it up again as an adult. And how grateful am I to have spent a significant portion of my childhood playing in the southernmost edges of these woods in Cape May County. --John Bruce

Instrumental to the preservation of the Pine Barrens.

About the author

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.