Free Agents

Max Apple is an American novelist, short story writer, and memoirist whose work often draws on his Jewish upbringing. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1941, he grew up in a multigenerational Jewish household where Yiddish was his first language, and where a love of language and humor shaped him as a storyteller. His satirical fiction, including The Oranging of America (1976), Zip (1978), Free Agents (1984), and The Propheteers (1987), mixes real historical figures with invented ones in a gently comic spoof of American ambition and pop culture. Jewish characters and sensibilities recur throughout. In Zip, for example, a Jewish man from Detroit manages the career of a Puerto Rican boxer named Jesus Goldstein. His memoirs Roommates: My Grandfather’s Story (1994) and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother’s Story (1998) turn directly to his immigrant grandparents. In Roommates, Apple’s Orthodox Jewish grandfather, a baker who lived past 100, moves in with him during graduate school, and the book was later adapted into a film for which Apple wrote the screenplay.

Apple’s honors include the Ribalow Award from Hadassah magazine for the best Jewish fiction of 1985, along with the Jesse H. Jones Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He taught creative writing at Rice University for nearly three decades and later joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. His other screenplays include The Air Up There.