Author Talk: Noel Rubinton, Looking for a Story - A Complete Guide to the Writings of John McPhee

Darien Library welcomes author Noel Rubinton, who will discuss his new book, Looking for a Story: A Complete Guide to the Writings of John McPhee.

Noel will be in conversation with writer and book critic, Heller McAlpin.

About the Book

John McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965 and has written more than thirty acclaimed books that began on the magazine’s pages. But few readers know or fully appreciate the true breadth of his writing. Looking for a Story is a complete reader’s guide to McPhee’s vast published work, documenting much rarely seen or connected with McPhee, including remarkable early writing for Time magazine published without his name.

In chronicling McPhee’s career where he broke ground applying devices long associated with fiction to the literature of fact, Noel Rubinton gives insights into McPhee’s techniques, choice of subjects, and research methods, shedding light on how McPhee turns complicated subjects like geology into compelling stories. Beyond detailing more than seventy years of McPhee’s writing, Rubinton recounts McPhee’s half century as a Princeton University writing professor, a little known part of his legacy. McPhee inspired generations of students who wrote hundreds of books of their own, also catalogued here.

With an incisive foreword by New Yorker staff writer and former McPhee student Peter Hessler, Looking for a Story also includes extensive annotated listings of articles about McPhee, reviews of his books, and interviews, readings, and speeches. Whether you are already an admirer of McPhee or new to his writings, this book provides an invaluable road map to his rich body of work.

About Noel Rubinton

Noel Rubinton is a journalist whose writing has appeared in leading publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He was a reporter and editor for Newsday for many years. His writing has spanned many fields, including government, politics, culture, transportation, and history. His essay about H.P. Lovecraft and Providence is collected in the New York Times book Footsteps: Literary Pilgrimages Around the World and he wrote the foreword to Repression, Re-invention, & Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate. A graduate of Deerfield Academy and Brown University, he has been reading John McPhee's writing for many decades.

About Heller McAlpin

Heller McAlpin is a book critic whose reviews of literary fiction and nonfiction have appeared regularly for decades in publications that include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, and NPR. A student in John McPhee's first Literature of Fact class at Princeton, McAlpin worked for him on Coming into the Country after graduating.

She is also the author of the novel, Nostalgia, and wrote a column for book groups called Reading in Common for The Barnes & Noble Review.  is a journalist whose writing has appeared in leading publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.