Roger Angell Biography

Roger Angell was an American essayist known for his writing on sports, especially baseball. Angell had been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years. He had written numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and for many years wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker.

He received a number of awards for his writing, including the George Polk Award for Commentary in 1980, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2005 along with Umberto Eco, and the inaugural PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing in 2011.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and is a long-time ex-officio member of the council of the Authors Guild. He was named the 2014 recipient of the J. G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America on December 10, 2013.

Roger Angell Age

Roger Angell was born on September 19, 1920, in New York City, New York, United States. He died at the age of 101 years.

Roger Angell Death

Angell passed away at the age of 101 on May 20, 2022, in Manhattan, New York, United States. His cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Roger Angell Height

Angell stood at an estimated height of about 5 feet 8 inches tall.

Roger Angell Family

Roger Angell was born in New York, New York, United States to Katharine Sergeant Angell White, she was a writer and the fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 to 1960. and Ernest Angell, he was the President of the American Civil Liberties Union for 19 years, from 1950 to 1969.

Roger Angell Wife

Roger Angell married a writer and teacher Evelyn Baker Nelson in 1942 and from there he got into another relationship with Carol Rogge Angell whom he married in 1964 until her death which departed them apart in 2012 in Carol Rogge Angell. His wife Carol Rogge Angell died of metastatic breast cancer at the age of 73.

Roger Angell Children

Roger Angell had three children Callie Angell (daughter), Alice Angell Evangelista, and John Henry Angell (son). His child Alice Angell lived in Portland, Maine, and passed away from cancer on February 2, 2019, and John Henry Angell lives in Portland, Oregon.

Roger Angell Salary

Angell earned an estimated salary of about $10000 to $50000 annually.

Roger Angell Net worth

Roger Angell earned his income from businesses and from other related organizations. He also earned his income from his work as an essayist. He had an estimated net worth of $ 5 million dollars.

Roger Angell Education

Roger Angell graduated from Pomfret School in 1938 and from there he joined Harvard University. He has served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.

Roger Angell Essayist

Roger Angell published his works as short fiction and personal narratives. Several of these pieces were collected in The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970). He first contributed them to The New Yorker in March 1944.

His contributions have continued into 2018. In 1948, Angell was employed at Holiday Magazine, a travel magazine that featured literary writers. He first wrote professionally about baseball in 1962, when William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, had him travel to Florida to write about spring training.

Angell has been called the “Poet Laureate of baseball” but dislikes the term. In a review of Once More Around the Park for the Journal of Sport History, Richard C. Crepeau wrote that “Gone for Good”,

Angell’s essay on the career of Steve Blass,[note “may be the best piece that anyone has ever written on baseball or any other sport”. Angell was one of several personalities who gave commentaries throughout the Ken Burns series, Baseball, in 1994.

One of the most striking items from Angell’s essays is one ultimately published in Season Ticket, involving a spring training trip to see the Baltimore Orioles, where he interviews Earl Weaver, then the manager of the Orioles, about Cal Ripken, Jr., who was about to start his rookie season.

Angell quotes Weaver as saying about Ripken that, at whichever position the team decides (between shortstop and third base), “his manager can just write his name into the lineup every day for the next fifteen years; that’s how good he is”.

Starting that year, Ripken, in fact, was written into lineups every day for more than fifteen years, setting the all-time consecutive-games-played streak of 2,632 games. Angell’s quotation of Weaver stands as one of the most incredibly prescient (and well-documented) “first-guesses” in recorded literature.

Roger Angell Books

• The Summer Game 1972
• Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion 1977
• This Old Man: All in Pieces 2015
• Late innings 1982
• Season Ticket: A Baseball Companion 1988
• The Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket 2013
• Ppk06 a Pitcher’s Story 2002
• A day in the life of Roger Angell 1970
• Once more around the park 1991
• Let me finish 2006
• Baseball T.C. Boyle
• A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone 2001
• Here Is New York 1949

Roger Angell Essay Preview

Throughout his tenure at The New Yorker, Roger Angell has received the reputation as one of the best baseball writers ever, though his contributions to the magazine do not stop there. His family likely influenced his decision to join the magazine as both his mother and step-father worked for The New Yorker. This Harvard graduate began his work at the newspaper in 1962 as an editor, but now mostly writes about his passion: baseball.

Roger Angell grew up in a less-than-perfect household. His father was unfaithful to his mother, and it was said that it went the other way also. At the age of eight, Angell’s parents divorced. His mother, an editor at The New Yorker, remarried only three months later to her colleague, E.B. White, also an editor. (Angell) Angell lived with his mother and step-father during his childhood. In 1942, he would graduate from Harvard. (Baseballlibrary.com)

Angell began writing for The New Yorker in 1962. It wasn’t so much his knowledge of baseball that made him a great writer, but the fact that he was a fan. His articles were never overloaded with statistics and many would not even include one. His view from a fan’s perspective forced his articles to focus more on the emotions he felt during the games and how the way the players reacted towards the game. Inside Sports columnist, Richard Ford explained Angell’s writing techniques.

Roger Angell has been writing about baseball for more than forty years mostly for the New Yorker magazine and for my money, he’s the best there is at it. There’s no writer I know whose writing on sport, and particularly baseball, is as anticipated, as often reread and passed from hand to hand by knowledgeable baseball enthusiasts as Angell’s is, or whose work is more routinely and delightedly read by those who really aren’t enthusiasts.

Among the thirty selections in this volume are several individual essays and profiles (the Bob Gibson profile, ‘Distance,’ for instance) which can be counted in that extremely small group of sports articles that people talk over and quote for decades, and which have managed to make a lasting contribution to the larger body of American writing.

Roger Angell credited his superior writing skills to be given the freedom to write about what he wants, how he wants to write.  Angell: ‘I think that instinctively I thought I’d have to trust myself and to report about what I was seeing, what I was thinking like a fan, and not to try to fake it by being knowing about these players and their deliveries and all that stuff which I later learned about.