Charles E. Van Loan
Charles E. Van Loan was an influential American writer and sports journalist, born on June 29, 1876, in San Jose, California. He began his career as a stenographer and soon transitioned into sports reporting, covering minor league baseball games for the Los Angeles Examiner before joining the Los Angeles Morning Herald in 1904. Van Loan's writing career flourished as he moved to prestigious publications, including the Denver Post and the New York American. He is best known for his character-driven stories, often centered around themes of redemption in sports, particularly baseball, boxing, and horse racing. His notable works include collections such as "The Big League" and "The Ten-Thousand-Dollar Arm." Van Loan's style combined moral and sentimental elements with humor, drawing comparisons to fellow sportswriters like Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon. He died at the young age of 42 on March 2, 1919, due to complications from a car accident, leaving behind a significant legacy in American sports literature. A collection of his stories was published posthumously in 2004, highlighting his enduring impact on the genre.
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Subject Terms
Charles E. Van Loan
Writer
- Born: June 29, 1876
- Birthplace: San Jose, California
- Died: March 2, 1919
- Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Biography
Charles Emmett Van Loan was born on June 29, 1876, in San Jose, California. He married Emma C. Lenz on November 20, 1902, and the couple had a son and a daughter. While working as a stenographer in Los Angeles, he accompanied his employer to minor league baseball games and sent accounts of these games to the Los Angeles Examiner. In 1904, he joined the Los Angeles Morning Herald as a sports reporter and editor, moving to the Denver Post in 1907 and the New York American in 1909.
In New York, Van Loan became friends with Robert H. Davis, the editor of Munsey’s Magazine, who helped him to publish his first two stories, “The Drug Store Derby,” on racing, and “The Golden Ball of the Argonauts,” on baseball, in magazines in 1909. By 1911, Van Loan quit his newspaper job to concentrate on his fiction. For the next ten years he would be one of the most prolific magazine writers in the United States, publishing stories not only in Munsey’s but also in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and other leading periodicals. He would produce several collections of stories in that decade, mostly on baseball, such as The Big League, The Ten-Thousand-Dollar Arm, and Other Tales of the Big League, and Score by Innings. He also wrote short stories on boxing that were published in Inside the Ropes and Taking the Count: Prize Ring Stories, horse racing published in Old Man Curry: Race Track Stories, and golf published in Fore!. Buck Parvin and the Movies was a collection of short stories about the film industry.
Van Loan’s stories are character-driven and often concern players redeemed by heroic acts. For example in “The Crab,” a typical Van Loan story collected in The Big League, an aging outfielder is relegated to the bench by his failing arm. However, he enters a pennant-deciding game, makes the winning catch, and retires with dignity. While his fiction was often moral and sentimental, Van Loan’s work also was humorous, resembling the fiction of his friends and fellow sportswriters Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon.
Van Loan died on March 2, 1919, at the age of forty-two, of complications from injuries suffered in a car accident a few years earlier. His obituary noted that he probably had the largest male readership of any magazine writer in America. In 2004, a collection of his work, The Collected Baseball Stories, was published posthumously.