Nicholas Dawidoff

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Nicholas Dawidoff (born November 30, 1962) is an American writer.

Dawidoff was born in New York City, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut 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). A full text reprint (by permission of the author) is available here.

He graduated from The Hopkins School and the attended Harvard University, graduating 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.

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.

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.

[edit] Published 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.

• In The Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (1998), is 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.

• He edited Baseball: A Literary Anthology (March 2002), in which he compiled exceptional baseball writing.

• Fly Swatter: A Portrait of an Exceptional Character (May 2002), is a memoir of his grandfather, the economist Alexander Gerschenkron. It 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.”

• The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball (May 2008) is a memoir of his experience growing up in New Haven and New York in the 1970s, his troubled family, and how baseball helps him find his place.