George Plimpton: George Plimpton, who has died aged 76, became a best-selling author by not only writing about sporting heroes but by participating in those sports as well.
But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard man with a hint of an aristocratic British accent - also had another life as co-founder and editor, for 50 years, of the Paris Review.
In the spring of 1952, he went to the French capital to join up with his old friend Peter Matthiessen, who was hoping to start an expatriate literary magazine. Plimpton took two bottles of absinthe to the founding meeting, and, having helped choose the title, was appointed editor.
The Paris Review was explicitly a creative writer's journal, carrying no book reviews or literary criticism. It had no overt political line, and was not wedded to avant-garde writing. Its craft interviews featured such names as E.M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch. Collected in more than a dozen anthologies, they have made a distinctive contribution to contemporary understanding of the creative process. Plimpton had a brilliant record of spotting talent; among his finds were Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides.
In 1973, he relocated the review to an office in his home in New York, where his parties became a preppy, literary, alcoholic, heterosexual alternative to the nightly saturnalia at Andy Warhol's Studio 54.
At the same time, Plimpton was playing an important role in bringing sports journalism in from the tabloid ghetto. With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with John Updike and Norman Mailer, he made sports writing something that mattered. He wrote about the way professional athletes coped with failure, ambition and envy, making them sound interesting.
From the late 1950s, he was a writer for Sports Illustrated, a magazine that crossed the barrier between Playboy and the hardcore sporting magazines, and it was while on assignment that his ventures into participatory journalism began. He wrote to Archie Moore, then the world light-heavyweight champion, asking if, in the cause of literature, he would agree to a three-round exhibition bout in Stillman's gym. Moore said he would be delighted. So, to prepare himself, as he recounted in Shadow Box (1978), Plimpton visited the Racquet Club library on Park Avenue, chose The Art And Practice Of English Boxing, published in 1807, and settled into a large leather armchair.
After his encounter with Moore, Plimpton persuaded the baseball leagues to let him pitch to professional players at an exhibition game. His account of that humiliation, Out Of My League, was a bestseller in 1961. Then he posed as a rookie quarterback at the training camp of the fearsome Detroit Lions football team. Telling the story in Paper Lion (1966), he revealed both his respect for the players as individuals and his strong rapport with the team.
Plimpton was the son of a patrician New York family: his lawyer father served in the US delegation at the United Nations. After Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive New Hampshire preparatory school, he studied English at Harvard, served as a second lieutenant in the US army, and went on to study at King's College, Cambridge.
His friendships extended widely across the American establishment. A lifelong Democrat, he was at the 1961 White House party where Gore Vidal squared off with Bobby Kennedy. Removing the novelist's hand from Jackie Kennedy's back, Kennedy said: "F*** off, buddy boy." Vidal replied: "You f*** off, too." Despite not having heard this repartee, Plimpton, who loved gossip, gave an account of it to Truman Capote, who embellished the scene in a way that humiliated Vidal - and resulted in an ill-tempered lawsuit between the two men.
Like Woody Allen's Zelig, Plimpton was everywhere. He was with Bobby Kennedy in 1968 when he was assassinated; it was Plimpton who helped wrestle down the killer, Sirhan Sirhan. He was in Norman Mailer's apartment the night the writer stabbed his wife Adele, and he was a prominent guest in 1968 at a fundraiser for the radical Students for a Democratic Society. For a time, he was known as Mr Radical Chic.
He was married twice: to Freddy Medora Espy, and then to Sara Whitehead Dudley. He had four children.
George Ames Plimpton, writer and editor, born March 18th, 1927; died September 25th, 2003