W. C. Heinz

Writer

  • Born: January 11, 1915
  • Birthplace: Mount Vernon, New York
  • Died: February 27, 2008
  • Place of death: Bennington, Vermont

Biography

Wilfred Charles Heinz was born on January 11, 1915, in Mount Vernon, New York, the son of salesman Frederick Louis Sylvester Heinz and Elizabeth Thielke Heinz. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1937. After graduation, Heinz went to work for the New York Sun as a messenger. He was promoted to copyboy and finally to reporter, covering a variety of stories. In 1941, he married Elizabeth Barrett Bailey, whom he had met in college, and they had two daughters, Barbara, who died of an infection at age sixteen, and Gayl. His wife died in 2002.

In 1943, Heinz was named the Sun’s war correspondent and was sent to Europe, where he submitted dispatches from the front about the Normandy invasion and other battles of World War II. Upon his return to the United States, Heinz became the newspaper’s sports editor. In his new capacity, he wrote feature stories and profiles of athletes for his column, “The Sport Scene,” covering baseball, football, and horse racing, but his greatest emphasis was always on boxing. When the Sun folded in 1950, Heinz turned to full-time freelance writing, contributing pieces to numeorus publications, including Life, Saturday Evening Post, Sport, Esquire, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and Look. Considered one of the outstanding sportswriters of his era, Heinz won the E. P. Dutton Award for Best Magazine Sports Story five times between 1948 and 1959.

In 1958, Heinz published his first novel, The Professional, which provides an up close look at Eddie Brown, a young middleweight boxer, as he gears up for a championship bout. Praised for its authenticity by writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard, the novel was rereleased to fresh acclaim in 2001. Heinz repeated his success with his second novel, The Surgeon, which follows Matthew Carter, a brilliant physician, through a day in his working life.

Run to Daylight!, the Heinz-penned memoir of Green Bay Packers’ coach Vince Lombardi, was initially published in 1963 and has since gone through fifteen printings. Heinz adapted the book for a television special that aired in 1964. Heinz’s best-known work, the novel M.A.S.H., written under the pseudonym Richard Hooker with H. Richard Hornberger, spawned a film adaptation directed by Robert Altman and a long- running television series.

In addition to the Lombardi memoir, Heinz wrote and edited other books about sports. Once They Heard the Cheers revisits former athletes long after their heydays. He edited two books on his favorite subject, The Fireside Book of Boxing and The Total Sports Illustrated Book of Boxing. Some of his often-anthologized pieces are contained in American Mirror and What a Time It Was: The Best of W. C. Heinz.

Heinz received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Middlebury College in 2002 and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2004. When he was in his eighties, he lost an eye to disease and unsuccessful surgery.