John McPhee

We were talking about writers and who's the big writer now, what with Philip Roth retiring, and decided that there's no big writer now but lots of really, really good writers that sort of add up to one big writer.

Don DeLillo comes closest, one of us said. Thomas Pynchon was mentioned as was Louise Erdrich.

There's no big poet either, someone else said, like there used to be. There are many more very fine poets than perhaps at any time, but there's no big poet.

Of course there is, there must be, a big writer and big poet now writing whose bigness won't be revealed until the corporeal body the writer belongs to disappears and the writing itself can be seen for what it is.

For the record, I volunteered John McPhee, the journalist, as our big writer, a writer who's written about almost everything. When asked about his own writing, McPhee wrote, "If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone."