Roger Angell
Roger Angell (September 19, 1920 – May 20, 2022) was an American essayist known for his writing on sports, especially baseball. He was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years.[3][4] He wrote numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and for many years wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker.[4]
This article is about the American sportswriter. For the astrophysicist, see Roger Angel.
Roger Angell
September 19, 1920
New York City, U.S.
May 20, 2022 (aged 101)
New York City, U.S.
Author
- Evelyn Baker [1]
- Carol Rogge
- Margaret Moorman
3[2]
- Ernest Angell (father)
- Katharine Sergeant Angell White
(mother)
- E. B. White (stepfather)
- Joel White (half-brother)
Early life and education[edit]
Born on September 19, 1920, in Manhattan, New York,[5][6] 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.[7][8][9]
After graduating in 1938 from the Pomfret School, he attended Harvard College.[10] He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.[11]
Career[edit]
In 1948, Angell was employed at Holiday Magazine, a travel magazine that featured literary writers.[12] His earliest published works were pieces of short fiction and personal narratives, several of which were collected in The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970).[13]
Angell first contributed to The New Yorker while serving in Hawaii as editor of an Air Force magazine; his short story titled "Three Ladies in the Morning" was published in March 1944. He became The New Yorker's fiction editor in the 1950s, occupying the same office as his mother,[14] and continued to write for the magazine 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."[15]
He first wrote professionally about baseball in 1962, when New Yorker editor William Shawn had him travel to Florida to write about spring training.[4][9] His career as a baseball writer coincided with the first season of the New York Mets. His style of baseball writing was inspired, he said, by John Updike's article on Ted Williams's farewell to fans at Fenway Park, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu". Angell said "John had already supplied my tone, while also seeming to invite me to try for a good sentence now and then, down the line.”[5] His first two baseball collections were The Summer Game (1972) and Five Seasons (1977).[16] These were followed by Late Innings (1982) and Season Ticket: A Baseball Companion (1988).
Angell has been called the "Poet Laureate of baseball" but he disliked the term.[4][9] 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,[a] "may be the best piece that anyone has ever written on baseball or any other sport".[18] Another essay of Angell's, "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.[19] Angell contributed commentary to the Ken Burns series Baseball, in 1994.[20]
Personal life and death[edit]
Angell was married three times. He had two daughters, Callie and Alice, with his first wife, Evelyn,[1] and a son, John Henry, with his second wife, Carol Rogge Angell. After 48 years of marriage, Carol Angell died on April 10, 2012, at the age of 73 of metastatic breast cancer.[21] In 2014, he married Margaret (Peggy) Moorman.[14][22] His daughter Callie, an authority on the films of Andy Warhol, died by 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, he 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".[23]
Angell died of congestive heart failure at his home in Manhattan on May 20, 2022, at the age of 101.[5][14][6]