Nicholas Dawidoff
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicholas Dawidoff (born November 30, 1962) is an American writer. Author of three books and editor of an anthology of baseball literature, he has also contributed to various publications such as The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and Sports Illustrated.
Born in New York City, he grew up in New Haven, CT, with his mother and sister. His father’s battle with mental illness left him without a prominent male figure from an early age – a painful subject he explores in a celebrated article for The New Yorker called “My Father’s Troubles,” June 12, 2000 (Father’s Day).
After graduating from Harvard University in 1985 with a degree in History and Literature, he moved back to New York to pursue a career as a writer and began working at Sports Illustrated Magazine, where he developed his story-telling technique.
He was selected as a Henry Luce Scholar and spent a year writing and teaching American Studies in Bangkok, Thailand. In 1991 he resigned from Sports Illustrated and began freelancing. He wrote, and continues to write, on a variety of topics, from politics to travel, for periodicals like The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine, earning supplemental income to allow him to write books.
His first book, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, published in June 1994, follows the strange life of third-string major league baseball catcher, lawyer, and OSS spy, Moe Berg. Baseball, a life long passion of Dawidoff’s (he played until a knee injury sophomore year at Harvard), is a main theme and common subject of much of his writing.
In The Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (1998), in an effort to examine the culture with the same seriousness with which jazz and blues are studied, explores country music through its history, places, and performers. Country and bluegrass music fans will be fascinated by his interviews and travels with great performers and songwriters like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Kitty Wells, as well relatives, friends and acquaintances of legends like Jimmie Rodgers, Patsy Cline and the original Carter family.
Baseball: A Literary Anthology, in which he compiles exceptional baseball writing, was published March 2002.
His most recent book, Fly Swatter: A Portrait of an Exceptional Character (May 2002), is a memoir/biography of his grandfather, Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron and was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in biography. A Seattle Times Book of the Year, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say this loving memoir is the most fascinating in its class.”
Dawidoff has also been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, as well as a recent Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in the spring of 2002.
He lives in Manhattan.
