Roger Kahn was an American journalist and author best known for The Boys of Summer. Born in Brooklyn in 1927, he reported on the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune during the early 1950s. He later worked for magazines including Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post and wrote about subjects beyond sport. He died in 2020.
His baseball books combine reporting, biography, personal recollection, and fiction. Subjects include the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York’s three major-league teams before the westward moves, pitching, and minor-league ownership. His biography of Jack Dempsey extended his work into boxing. Kahn also published essays and memoirs about the people he knew through journalism, politics, literature, and his own family.
Roger Kahn Books
| Book | Year | Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Passionate People | 1969 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Boys of Summer | 1972 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| How the Weather Was | 1975 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| A Season in the Sun | 1978 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| But Not To Keep | 1980 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Seventh Game | 1982 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Good Enough to Dream | 1985 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Joe and Marilyn | 1986 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Pete Rose | 1989 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Games We Used to Play | 1992 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Era, 1947-1957 | 1993 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Memories of Summer | 1997 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| A Flame of Pure Fire | 1999 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Head Game | 2000 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Baseball - A Literary Anthology | 2002 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Baseball As America | 2002 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| October Men | 2003 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Into My Own | 2006 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Rickey & Robinson | 2014 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
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Baseball Books
The Boys of Summer: Kahn combines memories of growing up in Brooklyn and reporting on the Dodgers with later visits to former players. Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine, and others describe lives that continued after their most celebrated playing years. The account connects the team’s history with segregation, family, work, illness, and aging, following the distance between youthful sporting achievement and the circumstances of middle age.
The Mutual Baseball Almanac: Edited by Kahn and broadcaster Al Helfer, this reference combines baseball essays with records, rosters, schedules, and information about players and ballparks. Contributions from major-league figures explain aspects of watching and playing the game. Other sections describe club operations, scoring, and baseball history, making the volume a contemporary guide to the professional game and its statistical record during the 1950s.
Inside Big League Baseball: Written for younger readers, this account follows players from the minor leagues into major-league competition. Kahn describes spring training, travel, pennant races, and the World Series, using examples involving players such as Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle. Accounts of managers and playing techniques explain the physical and mental work behind the game and the different responsibilities involved in sustaining a professional baseball career.
A Season in the Sun: Kahn travels through the 1976 baseball season, observing players and teams at several levels. College baseball, a New England club, struggling major-league competition, and prominent professional teams all appear in the account. Spring training through the World Series supplies the calendar, while the different settings reveal how ambition, employment, and the experience of playing vary across the structures of organized baseball.
The Seventh Game: Forty-one-year-old pitcher Johnny Longboat takes the mound for the New York Mohawks in the deciding game of the World Series. The game unfolds alongside his reflections on his past and the uncertain future awaiting him after baseball. Kahn’s novel connects the immediate pressure of pitching with personal conflicts, following a veteran player toward decisions about his career and the life beyond it.
Good Enough to Dream: Kahn recounts a season as owner of the Utica Blue Sox, a low-level minor-league club whose players hope to reach the majors. Team operations, travel, working conditions, and the pursuit of a championship form the immediate story. Memories of his father and time spent with his daughter connect the business and competitive problems of running a small team with a family history of following baseball.
Joe & Marilyn: A Memory of Love: Kahn examines the relationship between Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, following the public figures beyond their separate sporting and film careers. Research into their marriage and its aftermath supplies an account of affection, conflict, separation, and continuing connection. DiMaggio’s private vulnerability contrasts with his baseball reputation, placing a famous relationship within the personal circumstances and pressures accompanying two highly visible American celebrities.
Pete Rose: My Story: Written with Pete Rose, this account presents the player’s recollections of his upbringing, major-league career, competitive approach, and record-setting accumulation of hits. It also reaches the controversy over gambling that overtook his final years in baseball. The book records Rose’s position at the time of publication; it should be understood as that contemporary autobiographical account rather than a complete record of all later admissions and findings.
The Era: 1947–1957, When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World: Kahn follows the period when New York’s three major-league clubs repeatedly occupied the center of baseball’s championship competition. The account begins with Jackie Robinson’s debut and includes players such as Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and Yogi Berra. Television, managing, and changing city loyalties accompany the games, with the Dodgers’ and Giants’ moves west marking the end of the period.
Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game: Kahn revisits his development as a sportswriter and the baseball figures he encountered before access became increasingly controlled by representatives and publicists. Accounts involving Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Willie Mays, and others combine career recollections with portraits of players. The book examines the relationship between reporting and the game, preserving personal experiences of covering baseball as its professional and media environment changed.
The Head Game: Baseball Seen from the Pitcher's Mound: Kahn examines pitching as a contest involving judgment and psychology as well as physical technique. Historical accounts and conversations with pitchers and coaches address grips, speed, tactics, maturity, and competition with hitters. Figures ranging from Christy Mathewson to Bob Gibson and Bruce Sutter help frame a history of how pitchers approached the central confrontation of the game and changed its methods over time.
October Men: Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees' Miraculous Finish in 1978: The Yankees’ recovery during the 1978 season forms the focus of this account. Kahn follows disputes involving owner George Steinbrenner, manager Billy Martin, and players including Reggie Jackson as the team overcomes a large deficit to Boston. Clubhouse events and management changes lead toward the one-game division playoff, connecting a famous finish with the conflicts and decisions that preceded it.
Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball: Kahn returns to Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, drawing on reporting and recollections from the period when Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. The account examines both men’s backgrounds, decisions, and working relationship. It challenges familiar versions of the integration story, placing negotiations, personal character, and conflict within the institutional changes that opened the major leagues to Black players in the modern era.
Boxing Books
A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s: This biography follows Jack Dempsey from his early working life to the heavyweight championship and national celebrity. Kahn connects the fighter’s career, relationships, wealth, and public image with the United States during the 1920s. Boxing matches appear within a larger account of entertainment, ambition, and social change, drawing on the author’s acquaintance with Dempsey as well as historical research.
Collected and Personal Writing
Games We Used to Play: Four Decades of Sports Writing: Kahn gathers more than two dozen pieces written between the 1950s and 1990. Profiles cover athletes from baseball, boxing, football, hockey, and basketball, including Stan Musial, George Foreman, Glenn Hall, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Tributes to fellow journalists accompany the sporting subjects. The collection also revisits Pete Rose, placing reporting from different stages of Kahn’s career within one retrospective volume.
How the Weather Was: This collection brings together Kahn’s magazine reporting and personal essays, beginning with sport and extending into other aspects of American life. Individual people provide the focus rather than a continuous history of a team or season. Kahn also discusses his work as a writer and editor, connecting the subjects he pursued with the professional circumstances in which the pieces were originally produced.
Into My Own: The Remarkable People and Events That Shaped a Life: Kahn recounts his upbringing, development as a journalist, and relationships with people who influenced him. Baseball figures including Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese appear alongside writers and politicians. Accounts of family life, loss, interviews, and friendship link the chapters. The memoir places his sporting work within a wider personal history rather than restricting its subject to games or professional athletes.
Anthology Contributions
Baseball as America: Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game: This illustrated companion to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s traveling exhibition examines baseball’s relationship with American culture. Essays and archival photographs connect the game with language, entertainment, everyday life, national values, and social change. Objects and historical images provide part of the evidence. The volume is a multi-contributor cultural history rather than a single narrative written entirely by Kahn.
Baseball: A Literary Anthology: Edited by Nicholas Dawidoff, this anthology brings together baseball fiction, journalism, poetry, and oral-history material. Kahn appears among writers recording the sport’s players, spectators, history, and cultural influence. The selection places pieces from different periods beside one another, including accounts of prominent stars and less familiar participants, presenting baseball through multiple literary forms rather than a continuous history by one author.