The Crofter and the Laird [Paperback]

When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestorsColonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainlanda hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two or three hundred years; the rest, including the English laird who owned Colonsay, were incomers. Donald McNeill, the crofter of the title, was working out his existence in this last domain of the feudal system; the laird, the fourth Baron Strathcona, lived in Bath, appeared on Colonsay mainly in the summer, and accepted with nonchalance the fact that he was the least popular man on the island he owned. While comparing crofter and laird, McPhee gives readers a deep and rich portrait of the terrain, the history, the legends, and the people of this fragment of the Hebrides.

John McPheewas born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began atTimemagazine and led to his long association withThe New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book,A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, includingOranges(1967),Coming into the Country(1977),The Control of Nature(1989),The Founding Fish(2002),Uncommon Carriers(2007), andSilk Parachute(2011).Encounters with the Archdruid(1972) andThe Curve of Binding Energy(1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize forAnnals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.