A master chronicler of American life introduces us to the iconic and most curious American shad. A pithy, humorous, and illuminating standalone extract from John McPhee’s twenty-sixth book, The Founding Fish. McPhee, himself a shad fisherman, recounts the fascinating life and ways of this great American wayfarer, most famous for its Odyssean journey as it leaves the ocean in crowds of millions, running heroic distances up America’s rivers to spawn. McPhee introduces us to the habits and haunts of the American shad. We follow it along its spawning run, learning about its curious life cycle, biology, quirks, and mythology among fly fishermen. He opens with a tall tale about his long vigil with a giant roe shad on the line. Night falls, a crowd gathers on a nearby bridge to watch and still the fish refuses to roll over; however embellished, it’s a comic story. He fishes and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; he delivers a moving treatise on the particular sound that is unique to every river. In the process, he creates a portrait of America’s great waterways and of one of their most storied residents. They’re in the River is part of the Picador Shorts series “Oceans, Rivers, and Streams” in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.
Author
Princeton University and Cambridge University educated John Angus McPhee. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association since 1965 with the New Yorker as a staff writer. In the same year, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1968), Levels of the Game (1968), The Crofter and the Laird (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards. Selections from these books make up The John McPhee Reader (1976). Since 1977, the year in which McPhee received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the bestselling Coming into the Country appeared in print, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published Giving Good Weight (collection, 1979), Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), La Place de la Concorde Suisse (1984), Table of Contents (collection, 1985), Rising from the Plains (1986), Heirs of General Practice (in a paperback edition, 1986), The Control of Nature (1989), Looking for a Ship (1990), Assembling California (1993), The Ransom of Russian Art (1994), The Second John McPhee Reader (1996), Irons in the Fire (collection, 1997), Annals of the Former World (1998). Annals of the Former World, McPhee’s tetralogy on geology, was published in a single volume in 1998 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. The Founding Fish was published in 2002. http://us.macmillan.com/author/johnmc...
