Roger Angell, a renowned baseball writer and reigning man of letters who helped define The New Yorker's urbane wit and style through his essays, humor pieces and editing, has died. He died at 101.
According to The New Yorker, Angell died of heart failure.
Angell was the stepson of E.B. White, the staff writer of The New Yorker. He was first published in the magazine in his 20s, during World War II, and was still contributing in his 90s, an improbably trim and youthful man who enjoyed tennis and vodka martinis, and shot through his life.
Angell lived up to the standards of his family. He won the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for his contributions to baseball writing and was a past winner of the BBWAA Career excellence Award. The first winner of the prize was not a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.
His editing was a lifetime achievement. John Updike, Ann Beattie, Donald Barthelme, and Bobbie Ann Mason were some of the writers he worked with when he was a young man. Angell acknowledged that his work did not always make the cut.
Brendan Gill wrote of Angell in a 1975 memoir.
The Stone arbor and Other Stories and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell are two of the baseball books that contained Angell's New Yorker writings. He wrote an annual Christmas poem for the magazine for many years. He won a National Magazine Award for his essay "This Old Man" at the age of 93.
He wrote that he had suffered a few knocks but missed worse. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I have learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. I will pause until something else comes to mind if he sends a warning.
Angell has been married three times, most recently to Margaret Moorman. He had three children.
Angell's parents were an attorney and head of the American Civil Liberties Union. The New Yorker was founded five years later and had a young wit named Andy White as its fiction editor.
His parents were strong and gifted.
Roger Angell wrote a book of essays called "Let Me Finish" in 2006 that was filled with sex and brilliance and psychic murder.
Angell would remember the weekend visits to the apartment of his mother and her new husband, a place full of laughing, chain-smoking young writers and artists from The New Yorker.
He asked for a book of A.E Housman's poems, a top hat and a bottle of sherry for Christmas one year because he was so absorbed in literature. Angell had his first byline in The New Yorker in 1944, after he had edited an Air Force magazine.
There were no signs of family rivalry. White encouraged his stepson to write for the magazine and even recommended him to The New Yorker's founder, Harold Ross, explaining that Angell lacks practical experience but he has the goods. In a 2005 New Yorker essay, he noted that they were close for almost 60 years and that he got the sense of home and informal attachment from White.
The White-Angell family connection at The New Yorker did not impress everyone. Tom Wolfe mocked his cachet at a magazine where he worked, and former staff writer Renata Adler alleged that Angell established an overt, jocular state of war with the rest of the magazine.
Angell never wrote a major novel like White did. He was in the pantheon with both professional sports journalists and Updike because of his humor writing and baseball essays. He did not alter his prose style for baseball, but demonstrated how well the game was suited for a life of the mind.
Angell wrote in a 1987 essay that baseball is not life itself, although the resemblance keeps coming up.
The New Yorker was looking to expand its readership when Angell began covering baseball. He thought the real story remained on the playing field even as drugs and labor-management battles shared and even stole headlines. Angell, who wrote acclaimed profiles of Hall of Famer Bob Gibson and the fallen Pittsburgh Pirates star Steve Blass among others, never had official credentials as a sportswriter; he was just a fan, a former high school pitcher.
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