Jane Leavy
BestSelling Author & JOURNALIST
Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood and Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball.”
Her work has been widely anthologized most recently in a collection with National Book Award winner Ha Jin, Nobel Prize winner Louise Gluck, and former United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, called Driven to Write: 45 Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of their Craft (Routledge, July 28, 2025.)
She is one of fifty writers represented in The Great American Sports Page, A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins. Her contribution was the basis for her biography of Mickey Mantle.
Also: Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made A Difference; The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages; and Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame.
She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the sports section. She wrote features for the Style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including profiles of comic Danny Kaye, Jane Fonda, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, basketballer Muggsy Bogues, the 5’3″ guard for the Washington Wizards, which was longer than he is tall, and Loehmann’s, the off price shopping emporium, where her mother took her father on their first date.
She has written for many publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Grantland, and Tablet Magazine.
She grew up on Long Island where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. She worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, up the street from Yankee Stadium, where her grandmother’s synagogue held services on the High Holidays. She graduated from Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she wrote her master’s essay (later published in The Village Voice) on Red Smith, the late sports columnist for The New York Times, who was her other childhood hero.
She has two adult children, Nick and Emma Isakoff. She lives in Washington, DC, and Truro, Massachusetts.
Agent: David Black, David Black Literary Agency, 718-852-5500
Scenes from an author’s life: Finally, a new book’s arrival and what years of writing and research does to your desk!
News & Events
Nell Minow: Jane Leavy Fixes Baseball
Jane Leavy knows baseball. And she loves baseball. She’s a former sportswriter and author of best-sellers about Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle. Her new book is Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It. The book mixes history, memoir,...