Gary Pomerantz

Gary M. Pomerantz (born November 17, 1960) is an American author and journalist who has served the past seven years as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University.

Biography

He is the author of five books of nonfiction. His newest, Their Life’s Work (Simon & Schuster, 2013), is a narrative about the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty that follows the storied team across the decades and examines what the game of football gives to players, and takes from them.

Pomerantz spent nearly two decades as a daily journalist. He served as a sportswriter for The Washington Post (1981–1988) where he covered the Washington Redskins, Georgetown University basketball and the National Football League. He then moved to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1988–1999) where he wrote social and political profiles, special projects, columns and served on the newspaper’s editorial board.

In his first book, Pomerantz wrote about Atlanta’s historic rise and racial conscience in Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, named a 1996 Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times. His second book, Nine Minutes Twenty Seconds (2001), is a heart-pounding story about an aviation crash, also published in China, Germany and Britain. In WILT, 1962 (2005), Pomerantz recreates the legendary night when basketball star Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pa. Named an Editors’ Choice book by The New York Times, WILT, 1962 was called by Entertainment Weekly “a meticulous and engaging narrative – a slam dunk of a read.”

His fourth book, The Devil’s Tickets (Crown/Random House, 2009), is a true-crime thriller set in a bygone age when the card game of bridge was all the rage. The Devil's Tickets evokes the last echoes of the Roaring 20s and the darkness of the Depression when a suave and cunning Russian-born American named Ely Culbertson became the Barnum of a bridge craze that fueled marital uproar across the nation, including a husband-killing and sensational trial in Kansas City. The widow Myrtle Bennett was defended in the murder trial by James A. Reed, former U.S. Senator from Missouri and one-time Democratic presidential candidate. A brilliant orator, Reed put on a dramatic courtroom show of eloquence, logic and a few tears.

Pomerantz was born in N. Tarrytown, NY, the youngest of three boys. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (Class of 1982) with a degree in history. He later served as a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan where he studied theater and the Bible.

From 1999-2001 he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at Emory University in Atlanta. For the past three years at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., he has taught courses on specialized reporting and writing.

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, daughter of Charles R. Schwab, and their three children.^[1]

Books by Pomerantz

• Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (Scribner 1996)
• Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds (Crown 2001)
• WILT, 1962 (Crown 2005)
• The Devil’s Tickets (Crown, 2009)

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gary Pomerantz.

• Official Author Website
• Stanford University Department of Communication
• The Devil's Tickets Interview
• The Devil's Tickets Monologue Written and directed by Gary M. Pomerantz