Baseball legends hold a special place in our country’s collective heart. Dizzy Dean, Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron are still household names generations after their feats on the baseball diamond made them famous.
But perhaps none represents the promise and hard truths of the American experience during baseball’s golden age better than pitching great Satchel Paige.
Larry Tye is the author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. Mr. Tye’s book has been called a biography of two American icons – Satchel Paige, arguably the greatest pitcher ever to throw a baseball, and Jim Crow, the amalgam of Southern laws that mandated separation of the races everywhere from public bathrooms to schools and buses.
Satchel was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Casey Award and the Seymour Medal as the best baseball book. A paperback edition has just been released.
Larry Tye has been a prize-winning journalist at The Boston Globe and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. His other books including The Father of Spin, Home Lands and Rising from the Rail: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class.
An avid baseball fan, Mr. Tye now runs a Boston-based training program for medical journalists.
