Roger Kahn, whose The Boys of Summer is esteemed as one of the best books ever written about baseball, has died at 92, the Washington Post reports.
Kahn was a sportswriter for Newsweek and an editor for the Saturday Evening Post before writing his best-known book, which was published in 1972.
The Boys of Summer was part memoir and part straight-ahead sports writing. The book followed the Brooklyn Dodgers, Kahn’s favorite team, who won the 1955 World Series. He wrote about his fandom, and about the careers of the players on the team, including legendary names like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and Roy Campanella.
“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat,” Kahn wrote. “Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.”
Kahn wrote about 20 books over his career, including The Era, Memories of Summer and Games We Used to Play.
On Twitter, admirers of Kahn paid tribute to the late journalist.
“Boys of Summer, in a very real and tangible way, changed my life,” wrote Joe Posnanski. “It put the idea of becoming a sportswriter in my head. Years later, he wrote me a note saying he liked something I had done—it was like getting a message from Olympus.”
And John Thorn tweeted, “Roger Kahn was a wonderful writer and was exceedingly kind to me when I was just a whippersnapper in the sports line. He lives still, on bookshelves everywhere.”
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
