Roger Kahn

Biography

Kahn's family first settled in the New York area in 1848, and he was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. Kahn attended Froebel Academy, a prep school, then Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Kahn has worked as a journalist, author, editor, and teacher. In 2004, he was named as the fourth James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at SUNY New Paltz.

Kahn describes his background as a mix of Alsatian Catholic Jewish and Russian Jewish Marxist, and himself as a 100% American agnostic. He lives in the Hudson Valley community of Stone Ridge, New York with his second wife, Katharine Colt Johnson, a psychotherapist. He has two adult children, Alissa and Gordon. He was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame on April 30, 2006.

Writing career

Kahn began his newspaper career in 1948, when he took a job as copy boy for the New York Herald Tribune. A keen Dodgers fan, he reported on their games over the 1952 and 1953 seasons. He became sports editor for Newsweek in 1956, and editor-at-large of the Saturday Evening Post in 1963. His best-known book, The Boys of Summer, was published in 1972. The book examines his relationship with his father seen through the prism of their shared affection for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 2002, a Sports Illustrated panel placed The Boys of Summer second on a list of "The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time".

In addition to The Boys of Summer, Kahn wrote books such as Good Enough to Dream, a chronicle of his year as the owner of a minor league baseball franchise; The Era 1947–57, an examination of the decade during which the three New York clubs – the Dodgers, Yankees and Giants – dominated Major League Baseball; and Memories of Summer, a look back at his youth and early career, plus extended pieces on New York baseball legends Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. He also wrote a biography of the heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, entitled A Flame of Pure Fire.

Kahn's 2006 book Into My Own is a memoir describing friendships with Robert Frost, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Eugene McCarthy, and, in its last chapter titled Rescuing Roger, his late son, Roger Laurence Kahn, who suffered from bipolar disorder and heroin addiction, spent time with Michael DeSisto at the DeSisto School, and who committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning in 1987. Andrew Ervin wrote in The Washington Post that the book "proves that Kahn's not only a great baseball writer but also something rarer: a great writer whose subject happens to be baseball."

Kahn cites as his journalism influences, Stanley Woodward, John Lardner, and Red Smith. He has won the E. P. Dutton Award for best sports magazine article of the year five times, and tied for first once.