They're in the River

by John McPhee

A master chronicler of American life introduces us to the iconic and most curious American shad.

A pithy, humorous, and illuminating standalone extract from John McPhee’s twenty-sixth book, The Founding Fish.

McPhee, himself a shad fisherman, recounts the fascinating life and ways of this great American wayfarer, most famous for its Odyssean journey as it leaves the ocean in crowds of millions, running heroic distances up America’s rivers to spawn.

McPhee introduces us to the habits and haunts of the American shad. We follow it along its spawning run, learning about its curious life cycle, biology, quirks, and mythology among fly fishermen. He opens with a tall tale about his long vigil with a giant roe shad on the line. Night falls, a crowd gathers on a nearby bridge to watch and still the fish refuses to roll over; however embellished, it’s a comic story. He fishes and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; he delivers a moving treatise on the particular sound that is unique to every river. In the process, he creates a portrait of America’s great waterways and of one of their most storied residents.

They’re in the River is part of the Picador Shorts series “Oceans, Rivers, and Streams” in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.

98 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 10, 2025

About the author

John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Reviews

[Olivia Stepper · Rating 4 out of 5]

respect for a true fisherman

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love reading books about fishing because how else am I supposed to learn this stuff? Actually fishing? I don’t think so.

[Ross Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

McPhee is a master craftsman, and this long-ish excerpt from his book The Founding Fish (2003) sparkles with his characteristically effortless, elegant prose. Seeing as I myself am a dyed-in-the-wool trout bum who cut his teeth in the rivers and streams of the mountain west, my angling predilections could not, at one level, be more different from McPhee’s own (McPhee: “I’m not a trout fisherman, not a dry-fly fisherman, anywhere, let alone in a big Western river crowded with brush, deep near the edge, and racing wall-to-wall” [pp. 77-78]); and yet, at a level that is perhaps deeper down, I love this silver-tongued shad fisherman’s stories and ruminations, dart-slinging and all.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a set of three short(er) works by McPhee about the American Shad.

Fishing them, sure -- and the first of the three shorts is really just about fishing them, and it's wonderfully funny -- but also their migratory habits, their relationships with the vast number of dams in the US, the crazy story how a single human painstakingly introduced them to the west coast where they now proliferate in vast numbers, as well as the traits of the scientists who study them.

The book was short and enjoyable. ESPECIALLY the parts where McPhee self-recriminates when fishing next to superior fishermen. Those are just hilarious.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn't realized when I bought this that it was a lengthy excerpt from a longer work, which I'm now curious to read because parts of this didn't hang together entirely correctly without context.