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I always think of Intellivision when I think of Plimpton.

Author George Plimpton Dies in New York Aged 76
NEW YORK (Reuters) – George Plimpton, who edited the Paris Review literary journal for 50 years, wrote best sellers about sports from a participant’s view and even acted in Hollywood movies, died in his sleep at his New York apartment. He was 76.
“Last night, the 50th anniversary issue (of the Paris Review) was put to bed with him at the helm,” his lawyer, James Goodale, said on Friday.
“He had had some heart problems, but he seemed to be in very good health and we are all surprised by his death.”
Plimpton was also a prolific book editor, a television pitchman and a bon vivant of New York society.
Known for writing about topics through first-hand experience, Plimpton played as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions, played triangle for the New York Philharmonic, flew on a circus trapeze, fought bulls with Ernest Hemingway, pitched baseballs to Willie Mays and battled in a boxing ring.
The indefatigable Plimpton had been scheduled to leave for Cuba on Saturday for a reading of “Zelda, Scott, and Ernest,” a play about Hemingway, the author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, which he wrote with Terry Quinn.
Angela Hemingway, daughter-in-law of the famed writer, was with Plimpton late on Thursday afternoon rehearsing the play. “George and I spoke again around 6:30 last night,” she said. “I told him that I thought he looked better than he had ever looked.”
Educated at Exeter, Yale, Harvard and Cambridge, Plimpton was at home in literary circles, high society and sports arenas. “George had a rare gift,” longtime friend and Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer said in a statement.
“Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood. He was so open to life and all its new and unexpected situations. What fine manners he had! Few could give a toast or tell a story with equal humor. He gave vitality to the all-but-lost concept that to be an inventive gentleman was a thoroughgoing art in itself.”
UNLIKELY ENDEAVORS
Plimpton, a friend of the Kennedys who helped subdue Sirhan Sirhan after he shot presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy at a Los Angeles hotel in June 1968, was best known for writing about professional sports and other unlikely endeavors by taking part as an amateur.
“There are people who would perhaps call me a dilettante, because it looks as though I’m having too much fun. I have never been convinced there’s anything inherently wrong in having fun,” Plimpton once said.
In his first participatory journalism foray, he boxed three rounds with light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore in 1959.
Plimpton wrote in Sports Illustrated about his experiences, many of them becoming books like “Out of My League” (1961), on baseball, “Paper Lion” (1966), about playing NFL football and “The Bogey Man” (1968), about professional golf.
Ernest Hemingway called “Out of My League,” “beautifully observed and incredibly conceived.”
Plimpton was also at ease acting in films such as “Good Will Hunting” (1997), “L.A. Story” (1991) and “Reds” (1981).
Plimpton helped found the Paris Review while he was an undergraduate and helped it gain international attention by printing works from newcomers like Philip Roth and Jack Kerouac and established writers such as Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda and Gunter Grass rather than focus on criticism.

Born in New York in 1927, Plimpton is survived by his wife, Sarah Dudley Plimpton, and four children from two marriages.