Roger Angell

Roger Angell was a senior editor and a staff writer. He died in 2022, at the age of a hundred and one. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956. He wrote more than a hundred Sporting Scene pieces, mostly on baseball but also on tennis, hockey, football, rowing, and horse racing. In addition, he wrote film reviews, stories, casuals, Notes and Comment pieces, and, for many years, the magazine’s Christmas verse, “Greetings, Friends!” His writing has appeared in many anthologies, including “The Best American Sports Writing,” “The Best American Short Stories,” “The Best American Essays,” and “The Best American Magazine Writing.” His work has also been collected in nine of his own books, among them “The Stone Arbor and Other Stories,” “A Day in the Life of Roger Angell,” “Let Me Finish,” and “This Old Man: All in Pieces.” His baseball books include “The Summer Game,” “Five Seasons,” “Late Innings,” “Season Ticket,” “Once More Around the Park,” “A Pitcher’s Story,” and “Game Time.” “Nothing but You: Love Stories from The New Yorker” is an anthology of fiction selected by him. He won a number of awards for his writing, including a George Polk Award for Commentary, a Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011 he was the inaugural winner of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. In 2014, Angell received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given to writers by the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 2015, he won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for his piece “This Old Man.”