To most people an orange is just a snack, but to writer John McPhee it contained an entire universe of trade routes, frost cycles, and obsessive growers, enough for a page-turning book. McPhee helped invent modern creative nonfiction by treating factual reality with the same structural care usually reserved for a gripping novel.

From a Princeton childhood and a stint as a youth panelist on the quiz show 20 Questions, he developed a mind trained in taxonomy and deductive reasoning. His legendary process of scissoring notes into strips and mapping them on plywood produced Pulitzer-winning work and trained a generation of writers at Princeton.

• How his childhood and quiz-show years trained him to categorize the world
• Choosing near-total invisibility against the loud new journalism of the 1960s
• The tactile writing meth ...