Roger Kahn, elegant ‘Boys of Summer’ author, dies at 92

MAMARONECK, N.Y. — Roger Kahn rose to the top of the ranks of sports writer and editors — he was once sports editor at Newsweek magazine, and served at the Saturday Evening Post from 1963 to 1969 as editor at large.

But it was a 1972 book about his relationship with his father against the backdrop of Brooklyn Dodgers baseball that touched millions of readers. “Boys of Summer” became an instant best-seller and was hailed as one of the best sports books of all time, hailed 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 died Thursday at 92 at a nursing facility in Mamaroneck, N.Y., son Gordon Kahn said.

“Roger Kahn loved the game and earned a place in the pantheon of baseball literature long ago. He will be missed, but his words will live on,” Major League Baseball said in a statement.

The author of 20 books and hundreds of articles, Kahn was defined by “The Boys of Summer,” an object of nostalgia for the many fans who mourned the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.

“At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams,” Kahn wrote.

“The Boys of Summer” was a story of lost youth, right down to its title, later borrowed for a hit Don Henley song about a man longing for his past. Kahn’s book moved back and forth between the early 1950s, when he covered the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune, and 20 years later, when some were ailing (Jackie...