Between 1975 and ’77, a writer from Princeton, New Jersey made four long trips to Alaska for a story that would eventually become Coming into the Country. John McPhee had been writing for The New Yorker magazine for about 10 years. He was the master of a new literary genre that most modern readers are very familiar with: creative nonfiction.
The book is written in three parts, every word published first in the pages of The New Yorker before coming together for the book’s publication late in 1977. The book describes an Alaska both wild and settled, sometimes contentiously so.
It is about what McPhee came to believe was the real Alaska and part of the reason for the book’s continued popularity is that many Alaskans also feel that that’s the real Alaska,” Eric Heyne said. Heyne an English professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who has been teaching Coming into the Country since the late 1980s.
The real Alaska described in the book is a place sparsely populated by trappers, prospectors and squatters, living very much off the land and off the grid in the area around the Yukon River. Heyne specializes in Alaskan literature, and so it makes sense to him that the profile of these characters is inherently relatable to so many Alaskans, then and now.
A lot of people still have an image in their heads of that Alaska being what they identify with,” Heyne said, Mining. Trapping. Dog mushing. Canoeing.
A lot of people still in the 1970s didn’t know anything about Alaska,” Part of what McPhee’s trying to capture is its lure—and there’s nothing more American than that. The lure is always to go west and find bigger space. I think Coming into the Country an invitation for some Americans — maybe just an imaginative invitation more than actual for most — probably to the relief of a lot of Alaskans.”
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