His father's struggles with
mental illness left him without a prominent male figure from an early age – a painful subject he explores in an article for The New Yorker called My Father’s Troubles.[1]
Education and career
He graduated from the
Hopkins School and attended
Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1985 with a degree in
history and
literature. He moved to New York to pursue a career as a writer and began working at Sports Illustrated, where he became a staff writer covering baseball and the environment.
In The Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (1998), an effort to examine the culture with the same seriousness with which
jazz and
blues are studied, explores
country music through its history, places, and performers. Dawidoff interviews and travels with great performers and songwriters like
Johnny Cash,
Merle Haggard,
George Jones, and
Kitty Wells, as well as relatives, friends and acquaintances of legends like
Jimmie Rodgers,
Patsy Cline and the original
Carter Family. Condé Nast Traveler named it one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature.
He edited The Library of America's Baseball: A Literary Anthology (March 2002), in which he compiled exceptional baseball writing.
The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball (May 2008) is a memoir of his experience growing up in New Haven and New York in the 1970s, his troubled family, and how baseball helps him find his place in the world. It won a Kenneth Johnson Book Award for an outstanding literary contribution to a better understanding of mental illness.
Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football (November 2013) is an account of over a year spent with the New York Jets coaching staff as a way to understand how professional football works. It was called "Riveting" and "An instant classic" by The New York Times, was named to several 2013 best books lists, and was a finalist for a PEN America literary award.
The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, And The American City was praised on the front page of the Washington Post’s Sunday Book World as “a classic, tragic account of American incarceration…Dawidoff has written a great American book.” It was a New Yorker and Commonweal book of the year, won The American Bar Association’s book award (the Silver Gavel); won The American Society of Journalists and Authors nonfiction book award; was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for excellence in journalism; and was selected as Yale Divinity School’s “All Community Book” for the year 2023-2024.