Roger Angell One of the heavily featured commentators in Ken Burns' Baseball was Roger Angell, a writer for the New Yorker magazine as well as various books. I was pleasantly surprised to find Angell is not only still alive, but still writing as well. Here's an interview with him at Identity Theory, where he talks about writing, baseball, and writing about baseball.
I sometimes talk to young writers and I say, "It is a big surprise to me that I ended up writing about baseball this much." It's still a surprise. But it's okay because that's the way it worked out. It's a good fit. I happened to write about baseball and I was interested and enthusiastic and went back and did it over and over again. And that's the larger body of what I have written. I don't feel bad about it. Andy White wrote New Yorker casuals. He wrote light verse and wrote wonderful stuff about living in the country and being a country farmer. But in the end, what he is going to be known for is as a children's book writer. He was one of the greatest children's book writers of all time. And he didn't write Stuart Little until he was in his fifties. And in the end he was amazed that this is what he turned out to be—the very best of him went into a couple of books. You never know. I tell writers, “Don't decide if you are going to be a novelist or a playwright or a philosopher. Wait and see what kind of writing is going to be right for you, and it's going to take a while.”
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