Gilbert Leslie Rogin was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 14, 1929. He graduated from Columbia College. In 1951, he began a brief stint at The New Yorker as an office gofer. He served in the Army for two years before joining Sports Illustrated in 1955. His job was to clip articles from newspapers and the wire services for filing in the magazine's library, but soon he became a reporter. He was the managing editor of Sports Illustrated from 1979 to 1984. He then moved to the struggling science magazine Discover and helped stabilize it. In 1987, he became corporate editor, the No. 3 editing position in the Time Inc. empire.
He also wrote short fiction. The New Yorker published his first story, Ernest Observes, in 1963 and his last, The Hard Parts, in November 1978. The magazine published more than 30 of his stories. His short stories also appeared in other magazines. A story collection, The Fencing Master, was published in 1965. He also wrote two novels entitled What Happens Next? and Preparations for the Ascent. He stopped writing fiction in 1980 when The New Yorker's fiction editor rejected one of his submissions because he was repeating himself. He died on November 4, 2017 at the age of 87.
030