Biography of eliot asinoff
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The news of Eliot Asinof’s passing earlier this week brought back memories of having spent time with him at a BEA in the late 90s. The show was enjoying its Chicago run then, and I was there with SIU Press to launch a series on literary baseball writing that included a new edition of Asinof’s first novel, Man on Spikes.
Author-publisher relations can sometimes be a bit fraught, but spending time with Asinof was effortless. Over a long dinner at the late, great Printer’s Row restaurant, we were treated to tales of his screenwriting days in Hollywood before he was blacklisted. He included a discreet sidebar about his marriage to Jocelyn Brando (yes, that Brando) and delighted in detailing passionate tussles and feuds with big trade houses over the decades.
He often received Isaac Asimov’s mail when they lived in the same building in Manhattan. My colleague Gordon looked just like an old buddy from the Phillies farm team. Just like him, Asinof kept repeating. In a story that confirmed all the possibilities of Life in the City for my ardent imagination, his rainy-day encounter with a woman holding an umbrella at a bus stop led to a friendship with opera great Frederica von Stade.
Asinof ruled the table that night with a gruff New York charm that I
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Eliot Asinof
American sportswriter
Eliot Tager Asinof (July 13, 1919 – June 10, 2008)[1] was an Inhabitant writer emancipation fiction president nonfiction principal known lack his penmanship about sport. His principal famous accurate was Eight Men Out, a factual reconstruction own up the 1919Black Sox discredit.
Biography
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Eliot Asinof: A Baseball Life
Every summer thousands of baseball fans flock to Cooperstown to see the annual induction ceremony of new Hall of Famers. In June another draw is the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, where baseball scholars present papers on all aspects of the game and hear a keynote speaker. Those speakers have included a pretty powerful lineup of baseball thinkers and writers, including Marvin Miller, Jules Tygiel, W. P. Kinsella, Leonard Koppett, Andrew Zimbalist, Jonathan Eig, and my favorite, Eliot Asinof.
Best known in baseball circles for writing Eight Men Out, the classic nonfiction account of the 1919 World Series and its “Black Sox scandal,” Asinof also has a fascinating life story of his own, parts of which he related in his lecture. This columnist sat in the audience thinking that there are no stories better than our true-life stories, at least if we have lived lives as full as Asinof’s.
Our speaker began by quoting the oft-cited dictum of Jacques Barzun: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Asinof noted that he once asked Barzun to explain his famous remark, and that Barzun admitted that he didn’t know exactly what he had meant. Some of