Robert Lipsyte: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia

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Lipsyte was born on January 16, 1938 in [[New York]]. He grew up in [[Rego Park, Queens|Rego Park]], a neighborhood in the [[New York city]] [[borough (New York City)|borough]] of [[Queens]].<ref>Lipsyte, Robert. [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE7DD1231F931A15753C1A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2 "COPING; My Bullied Days: A Smart Fat Kid's Story"], ''[[The New York Times]]'', October 22, 1995. Accessed October 11, 2007. "Rego Park was predominately Jewish, and most of the bullying had no ethnic edge."</ref> Lipsyte’s father was a school principal, his mother a teacher. Young Robert devoted his childhood to books rather than sports. Instead of sharing a game of catch with his father, the two often visited the library. Robert's son, [[Sam Lipsyte]], is also an author and teacher at [[Columbia University]] in New York.

In the first chapter of his 1975 book ''SportsWorld'', which considers the role of sports in American culture, Lipsyte points out that he did not even attend his first major league baseball game until he was thirteen years old, despite the fact that there were three major league teams in New York: the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers. Lipsyte says he was “profoundly disappointed” with his experience at the game and so went to only one more game “as a paying customer.” His third major league game was as a sports reporter for ''[[The New York Times]]''.

As a boy, Lipsyte did play [[Chinese handball]] against the sides of brick buildings and participated in street games such as [[stickball]], but he felt acute pressure to excel at sports which discouraged his interest. This experience later developed into a major theme in some of Lipsyte’s nonfiction works such as ''SportsWorld'' and novels like ''Jock and Jill'' (1982) and his trilogy beginning with ''One Fat Summer'' (1977). The protagonist of ''One Fat Summer'', Bobby Marks, is similar to Lipsyte: Bobby is an adolescent in the 1950s, suffering from a weight problem, who does something about it. In 1952, Lipsyte took a summer job as a lawn boy and lost forty pounds, ridding himself of the youthful stigma of excess weight.

==Television==