Author Roger Kahn, whose best-selling "The Boys of Summer" was an emotional ode to Brooklyn and its beloved baseball team, the Dodgers, has died. He was 92.
The cause of death was not immediately announced.
Ranked as one of the best sports books of all time, the 1972 classic was described by Sports Illustrated magazine as "a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia."
" 'The Boys of Summer' is a baseball book the same way 'Moby Dick' is a fishing book," the magazine said. "No book is better at showing how sports is not just games."
Kahn, a native of Brooklyn and a Dodgers fan since birth, was thoroughly invested in the team's long legacy of futility.
As a writer for the New York Herald Tribune, Kahn covered and traveled with the Dodgers, enduring the heartbreak of World Series losses to the crosstown rival New York Yankees, the glory of 1955 when the team won it all, and the anguish of 1957, when the team moved to Los Angeles. But the book he wrote decades later reached deeper, into his own boyhood to tell a tale of love and loyalty, complete with line drives and letter-high fastballs.
Kahn, to be true, wrote about 20 books, many of them about America's pastime. But it was "The Boys of Summer," rich with stories about Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges and Carl Furillo, that put his book in the hall of fame beside his heroes.
By 2015, the book had reportedly sold about 3 million copies in 90 printings.
Kahn was born October 31, 1927 in Brooklyn to school teacher parents, and attended Erasmus Hall High School as a teen. He attended New York University, and began his career in 1948 at the Herald Tribune.
Four years later, he was assigned the Dodgers beat, and began a journey that would define most of his life.
Kahn's other books included "Joe and Marilyn," about the marriage of baseball star Joe DiMaggio and Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe and "A Flame of Pure Fire" a biography of the 1920s boxing champion Jack Dempsey.
He also wrote "Into My Own," a book about the 1987 suicide of his son, Roger Laurence Kahn, who had struggled with mental disorders and drug addiction.
Kahn's survivors include his wife of 30 years, Katharine C. Johnson; a son from his first marriage; a daughter from his second marriage; and five grandchildren.
