Writer’s Corner: Staying Out of the Rain

Crowd at a Harvard-Princeton football game, Nov. 8, 1913. (Library of Congress)

There are plenty of goodreasons to become a writer—exceptingof course a desire for money, fame, or respectability.

In “Phi Beta Football,”afootball-season essay for theNew Yorker about his childhood watching Princeton football games, John McPhee identifies another superb reason to devote one’s life to the written word:

…on a November Saturday of cold, wind-driven rain—when I was about ten—I was miserable on the stadi...