Roger Angell (September 19, 1920 – May 20, 2022) was an American essayist known for his writing on sports, especially baseball. The only writer ever elected into both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Baseball Writers' Association of America, he was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years. He wrote numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and for many years wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker. Early life and education Born on September 19, 1920, in Manhattan, New York, Angell was the son of Katharine Sergeant Angell White, The New Yorkers first fiction editor, and the stepson of renowned essayist E. B. White, but he was raised for the most part by his father, Ernest Angell, an attorney who became head of the American Civil Liberties Union. After graduating in 1938 from the Pomfret School, he attended Harvard University. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. Career In 1948, Angell was employed at Holiday Magazine, a travel magazine that featured literary writers. His earliest published works were pieces of short fiction and personal narratives, several of which were collected in The Stone Arbor and Other Stories (1960) and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell (1970). Angell first contributed to The New Yorker while serving in Hawaii as editor of an Air Force magazine; his short story titled "Three Ladies in the Morning" was published in March 1944. He became The New Yorkers fiction editor in the 1950s, occupying the same office as his mother, and continued to write for the magazine until 2020. "Longevity was actually quite low on his list of accomplishments", wrote his colleague, David Remnick. "He did as much to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine's nearly century-long history. His prose and his editorial judgment left an imprint that's hard to overstate." 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. His first two baseball collections were The Summer Game (1972) and Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977). Angell has been called the "Poet Laureate of baseball" but he disliked the term. In a review of Once More Around the Park for the Journal of Sport History, Richard C. Crepeau wrote that "Gone