AP NEW YORK Roger Angell, a legendary 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 for more than 70 years, has passed away. He was 101.
The New Yorker reports that Angell died of heart failure on Friday.Angell, the son of founding fiction editor Katharine White and stepson of longstanding staff writer E.B. White, was an heir to and upholder of The New Yorker's early days. He began contributing to the magazine in his 20s, during World War II, and was still contributing in his 90s, an uncharacteristically trim and youthful man who adored tennis and vodka martinis and saw his life as "sheltered by privilege and fascinating work, and shot through with good luck."
Angell surpassed his illustrious family's expectations. He received the BBWAA Career Excellence Award, originally the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, for distinguished contributions to baseball writing in the past, an award previously bestowed on Red Smith, Ring Lardner, and Damon Runyon, among others. He was the first non-member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America to receive the award.
It took him a lifetime to perfect his editing. John Updike, Ann Beattie, Donald Barthelme, and Bobbie Ann Mason were among the writers he worked with beginning in the 1950s, when he inherited his mother's job (and office). Even Angell's work didn't always make the cut, he said.
In his memoir "Here at the New Yorker," Brendan Gill stated of Angell, "He is highly competitive, unlike his colleagues." "He thrives on any challenge, whether mental or physical."
Several baseball volumes, as well as "The Stone Arbor and Other Stories" and "A Day in the Life of Roger Angell," a collection of his humor pieces, were published from Angell's New Yorker articles. He also edited "Nothing But You: Love Stories From The New Yorker" and contributed an annual Christmas poem to the publication for several years. He wrote "This Old Man," a deeply personal essay that won a National Magazine Award, when he was 93 years old.
He wrote, "I've taken a few thumps, but I've missed worse." "I can take the pains and insults." My language may be riddled with gaps and pauses, but I've learned to send a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one that follows, to see whether the landscape up there has any empty names or verbs. If he responds with a warning, I'll, of course, pause for a long time until anything else comes to mind."
Angell married Margaret Moorman three times. He was the father of three kids.
Angell was born in 1920 in New York City to Katharine and Ernest Angell, an attorney who later became the head of the American Civil Liberties Union. Five years later, the New Yorker was formed, with Katharine Angell as fiction editor and Andy White (as E.B. White was known to his friends) contributing funny pieces.
His parents were talented and powerful, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. "What a marriage that must have been," Roger Angell wrote in his 2006 collection of essays, "packed with sex and genius and emotional murder, and instilling a lifelong discomfort." Angell recalls weekend trips to his mother's apartment, which was "full of laughing, chain-smoking young writers and artists from The New Yorker" by 1929.
He was so engrossed in literature and the literary world in high school that he requested a volume of A.E. Housman's poems, a top hat, and a bottle of sherry for Christmas one year. Angell produced an Air Force magazine while stationed in Hawaii during WWII, and his first byline in The New Yorker was in 1944.
Family rivalry was not visible, at least not openly. White urged his stepson to write for The New Yorker and even recommended him to Harold Ross, the magazine's founder, saying that Angell "lacks practical experience but possesses the goods." Meanwhile, Angell penned a letter to his stepfather in which he expressed his admiration for him. He wrote in a 2005 New Yorker piece that they had been close for nearly 60 years and that "the sensation of home and informal attachment" he felt from White's writings was "far more strong than it was for his other readers."
Angell and the White-Angell family connection at The New Yorker were not without their detractors. Angell "created an overt, superficially jocular state of war with the rest of the magazine," according to Renata Adler, a former staff writer. Tom Wolfe mocked his "cachet" at a magazine where his mother and stepfather were charter members, citing nepotism as an example. Wolfe wrote, "It all locks into place, certain."
Angell, unlike White, who is most known for the children's books "Charlotte's Web" and "Stuart Little," never wrote a significant novel. His humor writing and baseball pieces, however, earned him a position in the pantheon alongside professional sports journalists and moonlighting literary authors such as John Updike, James Thurber, and others. He didn't change his language style for baseball, like Updike, but he did show how well the sport suited a mental existence
In his 1987 essay "La Vida," Angell stated, "Baseball is not life itself, although the parallel keeps coming back." "It's probably a good idea to keep the two separated, but old fans, if they're anything like me, can't help but notice how cunningly our game mimics a larger schedule, with its beguiling April optimism; the cheerful roughhouse of June; the grinding, serious, unending (surely) business of midsummer; the September settling of accounts… Then there's the sudden end of autumn, when we yearn for — almost demand — a long and brilliant final adventure right before the curtain."
When The New Yorker was looking to extend its readership in the early 1960s, Angell started covering baseball. He believed that the true story remained on the field, even while drugs and labor-management fights shared and even stole headlines. Angell, who authored celebrated profiles of Hall of Famer Bob Gibson and fallen Pittsburgh Pirates star Steve Blass, among others, had no recognized credentials as a columnist; he was simply a fan, a former high school pitcher who once aspired to the big leagues.
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