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Martha McPhee
is the acclaimed author of the novels An Elegant Woman, Dear Money, L’America, Gorgeous Lies, and Bright Angel Time. Her work has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a nomination from the National Book Award. Her novels have been Best Books of The Year on The New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune booklists. Her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Newark Star Ledger, Vogue, More, Harper’s Bazaar, Self, Traveler, Travel & Leisure, among many others.
The fourth daughter of the celebrated New Yorker nonfiction writer, John McPhee, Ms. McPhee comes from a family steeped in the arts. Her mother was a portrait photographer. Her four sisters are writers and work in the fields of literature, photography, art history, and translation. The entire family is equally steeped in education, dedicating their lives to the ways in which the arts infuse every course of study, understanding that creative thinking helps solve problems of all kinds—an appreciation that Ms. McPhee has brought to her classroom at Hofstra University where she is a tenured professor in the English Department, teaching Creative Writing there since 2002.
Ms. McPhee published her first novel in 1997, Bright Angel Time, the story of the conventional 1950s crashing into the counter-culture of the 1960s as told from the point of view of an eight-year old girl. Researching history became an essential tool in her craft, carrying her through her other works to the Bollywood film world, to the mortgage-backed securities fiasco that led to the crash of 2008, to the American West of early 20th Century when the railroads worked to populate Montana so there would be industry along the tracks. Ms. McPhee’s work has taken her as far afield as India and Sri Lanka, to Italy, France, Morocco, all over the United States. She understands that it is crucial to know the details of which you write and that travel is the most important form of education. As Mark Twain famously wrote in Roughing It, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Ms. McPhee’s fiction and her essays have drawn from her life. Born in New York City, raised on a farm in rural New Jersey in a divided family that had a total of fourteen children, many dogs, many goats, many chickens, ducks, sheep, a horse, a donkey, peacocks, Ms. McPhee has made a life’s work out of ordering chaos with the written word. Living now both at her childhood home in New Jersey and her apartment in New York City, Ms. McPhee is thrilled to be joining Ms. Goodale in creating Bloomfield, Inc. to help bring the power of storytelling to corporate narratives so that through stories they can reach their customers, their audience in entirely new and innovative ways that meet the transformed world we live in now.