Roger Angell facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Roger Angell
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Angell in 2015
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| Born | September 19, 1920 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | May 20, 2022 (aged 101) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Genre | Sports journalism |
| Notable awards | PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing (2011) J. G. Taylor Spink Award (2014) |
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| Children | 3 |
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Roger Angell (September 19, 1920 – May 20, 2022) was an American essayist known for his writing on sports, especially baseball. The only writer ever elected by both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Baseball Writers' Association of America, he was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years. He wrote numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and for many years wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker.
Early life and education
Born on September 19, 1920, in Manhattan, Angell was the son of Katharine Sergeant Angell White, The New Yorker's first fiction editor, and the stepson of renowned essayist E. B. White, but he was raised for the most part by his father, Ernest Angell, an attorney who became head of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Angell was a 1938 graduate of the Pomfret School and attended Harvard University. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.
Career
In 1948, Angell was employed at Holiday Magazine, a travel magazine that featured literary writers. Angell's earliest published works were pieces of short fiction and personal narratives. Several of these pieces were collected in The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970).
Angell first contributed to The New Yorker with a short story titled "Three Ladies in the Morning" in March 1944. He continued to contribute to The New Yorker until 2020. "Longevity was actually quite low on his list of accomplishments," wrote his colleague, David Remnick. "He did as much to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine's nearly century-long history. His prose and his editorial judgment left an imprint that's hard to overstate."
Angell first wrote professionally about baseball in 1962, when William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, had him travel to Florida to write about spring training. His first two baseball collections were The Summer Game (1972) and Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977).
Angell has been called the "Poet Laureate of baseball" but he disliked the term. In a review of Once More Around the Park for the Journal of Sport History, Richard C. Crepeau wrote that "Gone for Good", Angell's essay on the career of Steve Blass, "may be the best piece that anyone has ever written on baseball or any other sport". Another essay of Angell, "The Web of the Game", about the epic pitchers' duel between future major-league All-Stars (and eventual teammates) Ron Darling and Frank Viola in the 1981 NCAA baseball tournament, was called "perhaps the greatest baseball essay ever penned" by ESPN journalist Ryan McGee in 2021. Angell contributed commentary to the Ken Burns series Baseball, in 1994.
Personal life and death
Angell had two daughters, Callie and Alice, with his first wife, Evelyn, and a son, John Henry, with Carol.
His second wife, Carol Rogge Angell, to whom he was married for 48 years, died on April 10, 2012, of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 73. He married his third wife Margaret (Peggy) Moorman in 2014.
Angell died of congestive heart failure at his home in Manhattan on May 20, 2022, at the age of 101.
Awards
Angell received a number of awards for his writing, including the George Polk Award for Commentary in 1980, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2005 along with Umberto Eco, and the inaugural PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing in 2011. He was a long-time ex-officio member of the council of the Authors Guild, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. His article This Old Man in The New Yorker on his "challenges and joys of being 93" garnered the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism in 2015.
Angell was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals in 2010, and he was the 2014 recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award of the Baseball Writers' Association of America; despite being a New Yorker writer, he was nominated by the San Francisco–Oakland chapter. In 2015 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a unique combination with the Baseball Hall of Fame.
