Jane Leavy is an award-winning American former sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post. She is the author of the critically acclaimed 1990 comic novel Squeeze Play, which was called "the best novel ever written about baseball" by Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...

. She also wrote a best-selling 2005 biography of Sandy Koufax

Sandy Koufax

Sanford "Sandy" Koufax is a former left-handed baseball pitcher who played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball career for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers...

. She lives in Washington, D.C. She is originally from Roslyn, New York, and graduated from Barnard College

Barnard College

Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...

 in 1974 and Columbia University School of Journalism in 1976. She has a house in Truro, Massachusetts

Truro, Massachusetts

Truro is a town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States, comprising two villages: Truro and North Truro. Located two hours outside Boston, it is a summer vacation community just south of the northern tip of Cape Cod, in an area known as the "Outer Cape"...

 on Cape Cod

Cape Cod

Cape Cod, often referred to locally as simply the Cape, is a cape in the easternmost portion of the state of Massachusetts, in the Northeastern United States...

.

Her latest book is The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, an extensive chronicle of Mantle's off-field behavior published in 2010. The book is based on interviews she had with the late Yankee slugger

Mickey Mantle

Mickey Charles Mantle was an American professional baseball player. Mantle is regarded by many to be the greatest switch hitter of all time, and one of the greatest players in baseball history. Mantle was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974.Mantle was noted for his hitting...

. Excerpts from the book have been published in Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated

Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...

.