Chad Harbach

Chad Harbach
Chad Harbach at the 2011 Texas Book Festival.
Occupation	Editor, writer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Virginia

Chad Harbach (born 1975) is an American writer. An editor at the journal n + 1, he is the author of the 2011 novel The Art of Fielding.

Harbach grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. His father was an accountant and his mother the head of a Montessori school. Harbach graduated from Harvard University, where he became friendly with fellow writers and journalists Keith Gessen and Benjamin Kunkel. He received an MFA from the University of Virginia.

In 2004, Mark Greif, Gessen, Harbach, Kunkel, and Marco Roth launched the literary journal n + 1; Harbach had come up with the name as early as 1998. Harbach is both an editor and writer for the journal, contributing essays on environmentalism, David Foster Wallace, and the Boston Red Sox.

Harbach worked on his baseball novel, The Art of Fielding, for nine years. In high school, Harbach had played baseball, along with golf and basketball; in March 2010, he told Bloomberg News, “What fascinates me about baseball is that although it’s a team game, and a team becomes a kind of family, the players on the field are each very much alone. Your teammates depend on you and support you, but at the moments that count they can’t bail you out.” After a heated auction ($665,000), the book was acquired and published by Little, Brown in the fall of 2011. A Vanity Fair e-book describing the writing and publication of the novel was later released.

Harbach edited a book about two American writing cultures, the MFA and New York City, released in February 2014.