Epidaurus, Greece, 2014

when, in my news reading, I come across gobbledygook like this:  

Fulmer became the fourth Tigers pitcher since 1913 to strike out 11 or more batters in one of his first five Major League appearances ...

In “On Writing Well,” his classic guide to nonfiction composition first published in 1976, Zinsser cautioned aspiring sports writers against overdosing readers on superfluous statistics.  Such articles, he said, betray “a figure freak amok at his typewriter.”   Nowadays we imagine these freaks writing on laptop computers that, for all their compositional advantages over typewriters, too easily spew out mind-numbing statistics that are not merely superfluous but utterly uninteresting.  Much better, Zinsser advised, to forget the stats and concentrate — as the late sports scribe Red Smith did so well  — on literacy and original imagery.

Zinsser died last summer at age 92.  He left us 18 books and a lasting respect for literacy.  Long one of his disciples (on my shelf is the second edition of OWW, published in 1980), I often turned to his counsel during my career as a newspaper editor. 

“Few people realize how badly they write,” Zinsser could say with authority.  His first piece of advice was always: “Simplify. Simplify.”  

In 2004, he published “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past.”  It was as much a book about HIS life as it was a tutorial on autobiography.  “Be content to tell your small portion of a larger story,” he wrote. “Too short is always better than too long.”   Happily, Zinsser lived long enough to provide us with an abundance of such snippets.

I was drawn to Zinsser also because of his overt passion not only for baseball but also for the songs of Broadway and Hollywood.  I mean, how American can you get?  

“Spring Training,” his book about the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 1988 preparatory month in Bradenton, Florida, remains a one-of-a-kind baseball primer rich in the nuances of the sport.  I tout it without hesitation as a must-read for baseball aficionados. 

And his 2001 book “Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs” explores what he calls “the golden age of American popular song,” beginning with the musical Show Boat in 1927 and lasting 40 years until the rise of rock music in the mid-1960s.  There is no disputing that the classics by Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Rogers and Hammerstein, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and so many other songwriters of that era are as uplifting today as they were then

And while we take Zinsser’s authority on lyric-writing for granted, how many knew about his skill as a  jazz pianist?  He could analyze the tunes, too.   

Like this:  “What moved me most when I first heard ’Stormy Weather’ was the blue melodic line – the sorrowful arc of flatted notes – and when ‘Ill Wind’ came along a year later I was addicted to the Arlen sound. There was something ancient and mysterious about the melody. It sounded as old as Jerusalem.” 

In his last years, Zinsser wrote a series of columns for the website of American Scholar magazine.   These essays constituted his parting thoughts on familiar subjects: popular culture, travel, language, music and, of course, the craft of writing.  One of the pieces lauded the screenwriter Daniel Fuchs who, unlike many celebrity scribes who fled Hollywood after making the quick buck, hung around for 34 years.  The columns eventually became Zinsser’s final book: “The Writer Who Stayed.”

Hemingway Museum at Finca Vigía, Cuba, 2012

Paris, 2012

Sarasota, Florida, 2008

Paris, 2012