New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen spent decades telling other people's stories with compassion, precision, and unflinching honesty. The Pitcher's Kid was his own story, a memoir he finished just before his death in 2002 and never lived to see published.

The Pitcher's Kid covers the first eighteen years of the life that would produce one of America's greatest journalists. It begins in Depression-era New Jersey, in a family held together by a mother's quiet resilience and perpetually undermined by a father's chaos.

The father is the ghostly center of it all. Rudolph Olsen was a man who constructed his entire identity out of lies, including his alleged education and his supposed career as a professional baseball pitcher. Young Jack grew up as "the pitcher's kid," proud of a legacy that wasn't real, devoted to a father who wasn't who he claimed to be. That longing and that deception shaped his life.

But before any of that, there was just a boy. Small for his age, sharp as a tack, and desperate to understand a father who would appear and disappear without warning. The Depression years in New Jersey and Philadelphia were his classroom, and what he learned there, about poverty, about loyalty, about the stories people tell themselves to survive, never left him. He found his own footing slowly, painfully, and often hilariously, as a pitcher and championship bowler, then as a writer who would spend the rest of his life giving voice to people the world had overlooked.

Compared to Frank McCourt for its poignant depiction of poverty, to Geoffrey Wolff for its portrait of a deceptive father, and to David Sedaris for its sharp and often hilarious eye for the absurdities of childhood, The Pitcher's Kid moves between heartbreak and laughter with the ease of a natural storyteller at the top of his craft.

It is the last gift Jack Olsen left his readers. And it is the most personal thing he ever wrote.