User:Stevekluger

Steve Kluger is an author and playwright, born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1952, who grew up with only two heroes: Tom Seaver and Ethel Merman. Few were able to grasp the concept. A veteran of Casablanca and a graduate of The Graduate, he has written extensively on subjects as far ranging as World War II, rock and roll, and the Titanic, and as close to the heart as baseball and the Boston Red Sox (which frequently have nothing to do with one another). Doubtless due to the fact that he's a card-carrying Baby Boomer whose entire existence was shaped by the lyrics to Abbey Road, Workingman's Dead, and Annie Get Your Gun (his first spoken words, in fact, were actually stolen from The Pajama Game), he's also forged a somewhat singular path as a civil rights advocate, campaigning for a "Save Fenway Park" initiative (which qualifies as a civil right if you're a Red Sox fan), counseling gay teenagers, and—on behalf of Japanese American internment redress—lobbying the Department of the Interior to restore the baseball diamond at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Meanwhile, he donates half of his spare time to organizations such as Lambda Legal Defense, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), and Models of Pride, and gives the rest of it to his nieces and nephews—the nine kids who own his heart.

Kluger's work includes the novel Changing Pitches (1984); the bestselling Last Days of Summer (1998), which has moved onto the reading curricula of high schools and colleges across the United States; the Lambda Award-winning romantic comedy Almost Like Being in Love (2004); and My Most Excellent Year (2008), described as "a novel of love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park."

For the stage he has written Bullpen (1984), a Boston Red Sox comedy ("not a redundancy," he insists); Cafe 50's (1988), a "medium-rare comedy with a shake"; Pilots of the Purple Twilight (1989), a comedy-drama set on board the Titanic (before it became trendy); and the ever-popular romantic comedy After Dark (2001).

He has also published a World War II history entitled Yank (1990), and is a regular contributor to newspapers such as USA Today and the Boston Globe.

Steve Kluger lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.