Roger Angell, editor, baseball writer at the New Yorker, dies at 101

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OBITUARIES
Roger Angell, editor, baseball writer at the New Yorker, dies at 101
As fiction editor, he helped mold the stories of generations of writers. As a sportswriter, he was enshrined in the writers’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

By Matt Schudel
May 20, 2022 at 5:24 p.m. EDT



Roger Angell at his office at the New Yorker in 2006. (MARY ALTAFFER/AP)

Roger Angell practically grew up in the halls of the New Yorker, where his mother, Katharine S. White, was the longtime fiction editor. His stepfather was E.B. White, the renowned essayist whose supple, self-effacing prose became the hallmark of the magazine’s style and whose literary legacy included “Charlotte’s Web.”

Mr. Angell (pronounced “Angel”), who was five years older than the magazine itself, began contributing to the New Yorker in 1944, and he joined the staff in 1956 as an editor of fiction. Over the decades, he helped mold the stories of generations of writers, including John Updike, Vladi­mir Nabokov, William Trevor, Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason.

He also wrote fiction, reviews, poems and miscellaneous pieces for the magazine, including revelatory essays about growing old. “Here in my tenth decade,” he wrote at 93, “I can testify that the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news.” ... Mr. Angell, who was 101, died May 20 at his home in Manhattan, said his wife, Margaret Moorman. The cause was congestive heart failure. ... Among Mr. Angell’s most memorable stories in the New Yorker were his idiosyncratic first-person essays about baseball, which led to his enshrinement in the writers’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014.

In his youth, Mr. Angell watched Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play at Yankee Stadium. He witnessed Joe DiMaggio’s rookie season in 1936 and vividly recalled, in a memoir written 70 years after the fact, the pitching motion of New York Giants left-hander Carl Hubbell, “gravely bowing twice from the waist before each delivery.” ... New Yorker editor William Shawn knew of Mr. Angell’s interest in baseball and invited him to cover the sport in a leisurely, personal way that was different from the approach of most magazines and newspapers.

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By Matt Schudel
Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004. He previously worked for publications in Washington, New York, North Carolina and Florida. Twitter https://twitter.com/MattSchudel