Roger Angell

Roger Angell (born September 19, 1920) is an American essayist known for his writing on sports, especially baseball. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years.[3] He has written numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and for many years wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker.[3]

This article is about the American author. For the astrophysicist J. Roger Angel, see Roger Angel.
Not to be confused with Roger Kahn.
Roger Angell
Angell in March 2015
Born (1920-09-19) September 19, 1920
New York City, New York, U.S.
OccupationAuthor
NationalityAmerican
Alma materHarvard University
GenreSports journalism
Notable awardsPEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing (2011)
J. G. Taylor Spink Award (2014)
SpouseEvelyn Baker (deceased)[1]
Carol Rogge Angell (deceased)
Margaret Moorman
ChildrenCallie, Alice, and John Henry[2]
RelativesKatharine Sergeant Angell White (mother)
E. B. White (stepfather)
Joel White (half-brother)

He received a number of awards for his writing, including the George Polk Award for Commentary in 1980,[4] the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2005 along with Umberto Eco,[5] and the inaugural PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing in 2011.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007[6] and is a long-time ex-officio member of the council of the Authors Guild.[4]

Angell was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals in 2010.[7]

He was named the 2014 recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Writers' Association of America on December 10, 2013.

Early life and education

Angell is the son of Katharine Sergeant Angell White, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, and the stepson of renowned essayist E. B. White, but was raised for the most part by his father, Ernest Angell, an attorney who became head of the American Civil Liberties Union.[8][9][10]

Angell is a 1938 graduate of the Pomfret School and attended Harvard University.[11] He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.

Career

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).

In 1948, Angell was employed at Holiday Magazine, a travel magazine that featured literary writers.[12]

He first contributed to The New Yorker in March 1944 and continued to contribute into 2020.

He 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.[3][10] 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 dislikes the term.[3][10] 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,[lower-alpha 1] "may be the best piece that anyone has ever written on baseball or any other sport".[14] Angell contributed commentary to the Ken Burns series Baseball, in 1994.

Personal life

Angell has three children: Callie, Alice, and John Henry. He had Alice and Callie with his first wife Evelyn,[1] and John Henry with Carol. Callie Angell, who was an authority on the films of Andy Warhol, committed suicide on May 5, 2010, in Manhattan, where she worked as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; she was 62. In a 2014 essay, Angell mentioned her death – "the oceanic force and mystery of that event" – and his struggle to comprehend that "a beautiful daughter of mine, my oldest child, had ended her life."[15] Alice Angell lived in Portland, Maine and died from cancer on February 2, 2019,[16] and John Henry Angell lives in Portland, Oregon.[2]

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.[17] In 2014, he married Margaret Moorman, a writer and teacher, as noted in the Ellsworth American newspaper. On September 19, 2020, Angell turned 100.[18]

Bibliography
Main article: Roger Angell bibliography

In 2019, University of Nebraska Press published No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing, a book about Angell's career written by Joe Bonomo.

Notes
  1. Originally published as "Down the Drain"[13]

References
  1. Evelyn Baker Nelson obituary, New York Times, Nov. 25, 1997
  2. Koppel, Niko (10 May 2010). "Callie Angell, Authority on Warhol Films, Dies at 62". New York Times.
  3. Kettmann, Steve (29 August 2000). "Roger Angell". Salon.com. Archived from the original on 13 January 2009.
  4. "Roger Angell". Contributor Biography. The New Yorker.
  5. "Roger Angell and Umberto Eco". The Kenyon Review. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  6. "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter A" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 18 April 2011.
  7. "Shrine of the Eternals – Inductees". Baseball Reliquary. Retrieved 2019-08-14.
  8. "Roger Angell as lively as ever at age 85". Sports Illustrated. 17 May 2006.
  9. Ulin, David L. (15 November 2012). "Roger Angell on what the dead don't know". Los Angeles Times.
  10. Smith, Chris (May 21, 2006). "Influences: Roger Angell". New York Magazine.
  11. Orodenker, Richard (1996). "Twentieth-Century American Sportswriters". Dictionary of Literary Biography. 171. Detroit: Gale. p. 5. ISBN 0-8103-9934-2 – via Google Books.
  12. Callahan, Michael (May 2013). "The Visual and Writerly Genius of Holiday Magazine". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 2018-05-29.
  13. Roger Angell (June 16, 1975). "Down the Drain". The New Yorker. New York: The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. pp. 42–59. Retrieved March 11, 2017.
  14. Crepeau, Richard C. "Review of Once More Around the Park" (pdf). Journal of Sport History. Vol. 29 no. 3. pp. 510–12.
  15. Angell, Roger (24 February 2014). "This Old Man". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2 March 2016.
  16. "Alice Angell". Obituaries. Press Herald.
  17. "Paid Notice: Deaths, Angell, Carol Rogge". New York Times. 14 April 2012. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  18. Betsy Morais (September 18, 2020). "Happy Hundredth, Roger Angell". Retrieved September 19, 2020.
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