Jack Ludwig

Jack Ludwig (born August 30, 1922, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada—died February 12, 2018, Long Island, New York, U.S.) was a Canadian writer who produced three novels but was perhaps best known for his short stories and his articulate sports journalism.

Ludwig grew up in Canada and was educated at the University of Manitoba (B.A., 1944) and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D., 1953). He later taught in several American colleges and universities, including the University of Minnesota and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He made the United States his home for virtually all his adult life.

The issues of Ludwig’s partly satiric first novel, Confusions (1963), are moral, social, sexual, and ethnic as a culturally schizophrenic young Jewish man seeks his identity. The hero of Above Ground (1968), after spending most of his youth in hospital rooms, finds rejuvenation in sexual encounters with a series of willing women. Both novels received mixed critical reviews; Ludwig’s characters were two-dimensional and unsympathetic. He was more successful in his third novel, A Woman of Her Age (1973), with his portrait of an 85-year-old former radical whose compassion lends strength to those around her. Many critics, however, thought him unable to sustain plot and characters in his full-length fiction and found his greatest strength to be in his short stories and sports journalism. The latter books include Hockey Night in Moscow (1972; later expanded as The Great Hockey Thaw; or, The Russians Are Here!, 1974), Five Ring Circus: The Montreal Olympics (1976), Games of Fear and Winning: Sports with an Inside View (1976), and The Great American Spectaculars: The Kentucky Derby, Mardi Gras, and Other Days of Celebration (1976). Ludwig also wrote essays, adapted several classic plays, and edited anthologies of poetry and fiction.