He has also written biographies of notable culinary figures Craig Claiborne and Alice Waters.
McNamee's essays, poems, and natural history writing have been published in Audubon, The New Yorker, Life, Natural History, High Country News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Saveur, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, and a number of literary journals.
He wrote the documentary film Alexander Calder,[2] which was broadcast on the PBS American Masters series in June 1998 and received both a George W. Peabody Award[3] and an Emmy.
"[6] In 1969 he joined Columbia Records in New York, and in 1971 produced the double album Music to Eat by the Hampton Grease Band, which was initially a flop but gradually gained fame and was reissued as a CD on its twenty-fifth anniversary.
McNamee attended Yale, where he won top prizes for both fiction and poetry and studied writing as a Scholar of the House under the tutelage of Robert Penn Warren.
[16] From 2007 to 2009 McNamee served on the board of directors of the Center for Education about Sustainable Agriculture in San Francisco,[16] which operates the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market & Ferry Building Marketplace and carries out a variety of educational programs.