John McPhee's "Pine Barrens," a New Jersey Must-Read John McPhee's 1968 nonfiction classic, "The Pine Barrens," is an expert portrait of a place and its people in southern New Jersey. I grew up in West Virginia and Florida, and since I was young I've been drawn to Southern lit like a bug to light - to William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, Harry Crews and Flannery O'Connor, Zora Neale Hurston and Cormac McCarthy. Last year I moved to New Jersey, a landscape that by comparison can seem devoid of atmosphere and charm. The singer John Gorka sums up this sense in his rueful song "New Jersey," in which he declares: "I'm from New Jersey/It's not like Texas/There is no mystery/I can't pretend." Mr. Gorka, I think, gets it wrong, especially about New Jersey's literature, into which I've been diving headfirst, at first loyally and now with ferocious appreciation. What American state offers a killer elite to compare to Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, John McPhee, William Carlos Williams and Junot Díaz, to name but a few, each of whom was either born or did sustained and important work there? It was Mr. Roth who uttered a line that links their often class-based work: "There are no uncontaminated angels." This summer the New Jersey book I plan to revisit is Mr. McPhee's "Pine Barrens," his 1968 nonfiction classic about a huge swath of southern New Jersey that (to this day) remains largely rural because of its sandy, nutrient-poor soil. The area's residents, known as pineys, were sometimes thought to be, Mr. McPhee writes, "weird and sometimes dangerous barefoot people who live in caves, marry their sisters and eat snakes." His calm and expert portrait is more kind, yet anyone who has driven through this area knows that there is more than enough mystery there. That goes for the entire state.