Roger Kahn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roger Kahn (born October 31, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York) is one of America's transcendent writers about sport - especially baseball.
His classic 1972 memoir, The Boys of Summer, examines his relationship with his father seen through the prism of their shared affection for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team Mr. Kahn would cover as a young reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. The first part of the book consists of recollections of Kahn's two seasons (1952-53) as a Dodger beat writer, coinciding with the peak of the Jackie Robinson era in Brooklyn, when Robinson - by now established as a major star and a leader of the Dodgers - still had to confront racism on and off the field. Kahn's father, Gordon Kahn, a radio-program producer, died shortly after the end of the 1953 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees, acting as a metaphor for both ending his youth and his entry into a more cynical adulthood. Despite the cynicism around him, including the move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, Kahn never lost his affection for the Dodger players he knew, nor they for him.
The second part of the book consists of his interviews with thirteen of that period's Dodgers between 1968 and 1971: Robinson, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Billy Cox, Carl Furillo, Preacher Roe, Carl Erskine, Joe Black, Clem Labine, Andy Pafko and George Shuba.
Kahn earlier worked as a general-assignment magazine writer and has excelled in writing about non-sporting topics as well. But, as an author, his work on baseball ranks among the best of his time, or, some say, any tme, In addition to The Boys of Summer, Kahn wrote books such as Good Enough to Dream, a chronicle of his year as the owner of a minor league baseball franchise; The Era 1947-57, an examination of the decade during which the three New York clubs - the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants - dominated Major League Baseball; and Memories of Summer, a look back at his youth and early career, plus extended pieces on New York baseball legends Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. His acclaimed biography of the great heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Dempsey, A Flame of Pure Fire, is under development as a major motion picture. No fewer that five of his articles won the esteemned E. P. Dutton Award for best magazine sports story of the year. No won else has equalled that stream of triumphs.
Kahn's latest book, Into My Own, (publication June 2006) is a memoir describing friendships with Robert Frost, Jackie Robinson. Pee Wee Reese, Eugene McCarthy, and his late son, Roger Laurence Kahn, who suffered from bipolar disorder and died by his own hand in 1987. Kahn writes with touching candor about his own and his family's experiences with Michael DeSisto, and The DeSisto School and how that negatively impacted his son Roger's life. That chapter, wrote Andrew Ervin in the Washington Post, "will send you scurrying for the Kleenex box. Kahn is not only a great baseball writer but also something rarer: a great writer whose subject happens to be baseball."
Kahn's journalism mentors included Stanley Woodward, John Lardner (the son of sportswriter/short story master Ring Lardner) and Red Smith. "Native to those people," Kahn said in an unpublished 1994 interview, "was the underlying presumption that you were familiar with a body of literature in English -- and if you knew Tolstoy, it didn't hurt, either... Our craft begins, as Red Smith said, with "a decent respect for the mother tongue."
Mr. Kahn lives in the Hudson Valley community of Stone Ridge, N. Y., with his wife, Katharine Colt Johnson, a psychotherapist. He was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame on April 30, 2006. On that occasion, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig wrote, "Roger is an icon in our sport." Dave Anderson, the Pulitzer-Prize winning sports columnist of The New York Times, added: "Anyone who has ever read any of Roger's vast collection of writing knows only too well that he is not merely one of America's great sportswriters, but one of America's great writers period."
