author
Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
1876–1919
Remembered for lively sports fiction and sharp humor, this early 20th-century American writer helped bring baseball, boxing, racing, and golf onto the magazine page. His stories were especially popular in the 1910s, when he wrote for major newspapers and magazines and built a reputation as one of the best-known sports storytellers of his day.
2 Audiobooks
Fore!
by Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
Old Man Curry: Race Track Stories
by Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
About the author
Born in San Jose, California, on June 29, 1876, Charles Emmett Van Loan became an American journalist and fiction writer whose work was closely tied to the world of sports. Sources available here describe him as a sportswriter for papers including The Denver Post and The New York American, and also as a regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post.
Van Loan is best remembered for short stories that turned baseball and other spectator sports into entertaining fiction. The records found in this search point to collections such as The Big League, The Ten-Thousand-Dollar Arm, The Lucky Seventh, Taking the Count, and Fore!, showing how widely he wrote about baseball, boxing, horse racing, and golf.
He died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 2, 1919. Later readers have continued to return to his baseball writing in particular, and modern collections of his stories suggest that his fast, funny, magazine-ready style still captures a vivid piece of early American sports culture.