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Author of recently released... "Deep Water Blues"....Fred Waitzkin was born in Cambridge Massachusetts. His father was a salesman, and his mother, an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor. To the best that he can recall, Abe and Stella never shared a warm moment. Early on Fred considered careers in sales, big game fishing, and Afro Cuban drumming but by the age of thirteen decided he would be a writer. Both of his parents were strong literary influences along with Ernest Hemingway: “His little sentences thrilling me with descriptions of men pulling in huge sharks and marlin.”
Waitzkin was an English major at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. During the summer vacation following his junior year, he met Bonnie on a sword fishing trip, and a year later they were married. He received a master’s at New York University and for a time considered pursuing a career as a scholar of seventeenth century poetry. He taught English at The College of the Virgin Islands on St. Thomas, but admits that it wasn’t love of teaching poetry that intrigued him about St. Thomas, but rather the rumors of thousand-pound blue marlin that were said to graze twelve or fifteen miles north of the island on a patch of ocean called “the saddle.”
Following the St. Thomas years Fred and Bonnie settled in New York City. After collecting a great many magazine rejections for his short stories, Waitzkin began writing feature journalism, personal essays and reviews for numerous magazines including Esquire, Forbes, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Outside Magazine, and Sports Illustrated.
In 1984, Waitzkin published Searching for Bobby Fischer, the story of three years in the lives of Fred and his chess prodigy son, Josh Waitzkin. The book became an internationally acclaimed best seller. In 1993 the movie version was released by Paramount and that same year was nominated for an academy award.
In 1993, Waitzkin published, Mortal Games, a biography of world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. It has been described as, “a remarkable look inside the world of genius—a brilliant exploration of obsession, risk and triumph.”
In 2000 he published, The Last Marlin, a memoir that was selected by The New York Times as “a best book of the year.”
In the spring of 2013 St. Martin’s Press published The Dream Merchant, Waitzkin’s first novel. In a starred review Kirkus wrote, “Waitzkin offers a singular and haunting morality tale, sophisticated, literary, and intelligent. Thoroughly entertaining. Deeply imaginative. Highly recommended.” A second novel, Deep Water Blues, published in 2019 by Open Road Media, is set on a remote a sparsely populated Bahamian island where a peaceful marina becomes a battleground.
Fred Waitzkin lives in Manhattan with his wife Bonnie. He has two children, Josh and Katya, and two cherished grandsons, Jack and Charlie. Fred spends as much time as possible on the bridge of his old boat Ebb Tide trolling baits off distant islands with family and friends.
Meet the very kind and talented: Fred Waitzkin.
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