How John McPhee became a writer

John McPhee has published more than thirty books, work that first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1963. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World, his comprehensive survey of North American geology. His work has inspired generations of nonfiction writers, and he has distinguished himself especially as a teacher of literary journalism.

How did he become a writer? From an interview with Peter Hessler in The Paris Review:

When did you first start to think about devoting yourself to writing? 

There weren’t any very early signs. My biggest preoccupation in childhood was sports, mostly sports you could play with a ball. My father was a doctor of sports medicine, and Princeton was his employer. As I was growing up, we lived very close to the campus, and in the afternoons I would go with him to the university sports practices—football, basketball, baseball. I hung around a lot of football players who were ten or fifteen years older than I was. After a while they made a Princeton shirt for me with orange and black stripes on it, just like the big guys had. I was number thirty-three.

One miserable November day I was down there on the sideline, wet, cold. And I looked up to the top of the stadium, and there was the press box. Shelter! I knew they had heaters in there with them, and these people were sitting there in complete comfort while we’re miserable down here on the field. They’re writing, they’re typing, and they’re warm. Then and there I decided to become a writer.

Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true.