the good neighbor the life and work of fred rogers

King, a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor who knew Fred Rogers before his death, paints him as a genius with an uncanny rapport with children-sprouted from boyhood struggles with wealthy, smothering parents, bullies, and asthma-and a determination to alleviate their angst. He is the author of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers.The creator and host of the 1968–2001 children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a paragon of friendliness, according to this adulatory biography. Prior to that, he served as director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media and was the president of the Heinz Endowments for almost a decade. Maxwell King is the president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Foundation. His lesson is as simple and direct as Fred was: Human kindness will always make life better. You don’t set out to be rich and famous you set out to be helpful. What a difference one person can make in the life of another.

And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. An engaging story, rich in detail, The Good N eighbor is the definitive portrait of a beloved figure, cherished by multiple generations. Drawing on original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work, including a surprising decision to walk away from the show to make television for adults, only to return to the neighborhood with increasingly sophisticated episodes, written in collaboration with experts on childhood development. The Good Neighbor, the first full-length biography of Fred Rogers, tells the story of this utterly unique and enduring American icon. Rogers was fiercely devoted to children and to taking their fears, concerns, and questions about the world seriously. As the creator and star of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he was a champion of compassion, equality, and kindness. Fred Rogers (1928–2003) was an enormously influential figure in the history of television and in the lives of tens of millions of children.

The good neighbor the life and work of fred rogers