Robert Michael Lipsyte was born January 16, 1938, in New York, New York, the son of Sidney I. and Fanny Lipsyte. He grew up in Rego Park, a neighborhood in Queens. Lipsyte’s father was a school principal, his mother a teacher. Young Robert devoted his childhood to books rather than sports. Instead of sharing a game of catch with his father, the two often visited the library.
In the first chapter of his 1975 book SportsWorld, which considers the role of sports in American culture, Lipsyte points out that he did not even attend his first major league baseball game until he was thirteen years old, despite the fact that there were three major league teams in New York: the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers. Lipsyte says he was “profoundly disappointed” with the experience and went to only one more game “as a paying customer.” His third major league game was as a sports reporter for the New York Times.
As a boy, Lipsyte did play Chinese handball against the sides of brick buildings and participated in street games such as stickball, but he felt pressured by society to be good at sports. This experience later developed into a major theme in some of Lipsyte’s nonfiction works such as SportsWorld and novels like Jock and Jill (1982) and his trilogy beginning with One Fat Summer (1977). The protagonist of One Fat Summer, Bobby Marks, is similar to Lipsyte: Bobby is an adolescent in the 1950s, suffering from a weight problem, who does something about it. In 1952, Lipsyte took a summer job as a lawn boy and lost forty pounds, ridding himself of at least one youthful stigma; Bobby Marks has a similar experience.
