This image is the cover for the book Wait Till Next Year

Wait Till Next Year

A touching memoir of growing up in love with family and baseball from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Team of Rivals and Leadership in Turbulent Times.

Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year recreates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.

We meet the people who most influenced Doris Kearns Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers’ leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.

“Endearing recollections of a feisty girlhood in the prefeminist, prosperous, confident 1950s on Long Island, in the orbit of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Lively, tender, and . . . hilarious . . . [Goodwin’s] memoir is uplifting evidence that the American dream still exists—not so much in the content of the dream as in the tireless, daunting dreaming.” —The Boston Globe

“A poignant memoir . . . marvelous . . . Goodwin shifts gracefully between a child’s recollection and an adult’s overview.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a world-renowned presidential historian and author. She has written six critically acclaimed, New York Times–bestselling books, the most recent of which is The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios has acquired the film rights to the book. Goodwin previously worked with Spielberg on the film Lincoln, based in part on her award-winning Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, for which Daniel Day-Lewis received an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lincoln.

Goodwin earned the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. She also authored Wait Till Next Year, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which was adapted into an award-winning TV miniseries. She is well known for her commentary and interviews on television and in documentaries, including Ken Burns’s Baseball and The Civil War.

Goodwin served as an aide to President Lyndon Johnson in his last year in office and later assisted him in the preparation of his memoirs. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Richard N. Goodwin.

Simon & Schuster