Baseball in American Letters

Twain, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Whitman All Wrote About Baseball

Dec 6, 2007

Baseball has often appeared as a symbol of American Life in many great novels and some really simple but wonderful poems.

American literature and poetry are chock full of baseball. Since the game first became popular with Americans, many novelists, poets, historical writers and essayists have devoted worthwhile time and energy (and more than a little bit of genius) to creating memorable works about the National Pastime.

Early Literary References to Baseball

As early as 1824, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about the nation's obsession with playing "ball - ball - ball!" -- a statement that refers to an earlier, simpler version of the National Pastime that was popular at the time.

Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, was a certified baseball nut. Even during the height of his fame, Twain routinely umpired club-level baseball games, and in 1889 he devoted a passage to the dangers inherent in the umpire position in his classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Leaves of Grass poet Walt Whitman said: "I see great things in baseball, It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism, tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us." Whitman was a great admirer of the sport because, among its other blessing, it was in his estimation, "so purely American."

Baseball in Classic 20th Century American Novels

Two of the most celebrated American novels of the 20th Century have baseball elements.

In The Great Gatsby, the eponymous hero conducts "business" with a known bookmaker named Meyer Wolfsheim, a man who is rumored to have fixed the 1919 Black Sox World Series. F. Scott Fitzgerald acknowledged that Wolfsheim was based on the New York crime boss Arnold Rothstein, whom many believe actually financed the Black Sox Scandal. In a phrase that was later borrowed by Ken Burns for his acclaimed documentary, Baseball, Fitzgerald chastises the Wolfsheim/Rothstein character for destroying "the faith of fiffty million people."

In the Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway's fisherman hero, Santiago, credits Joe DiMaggio as his hero. During his great struggle with the marlin (and then the sharks), Santiago often draws strength and courage by reflecting upon the legendary skill and tenacity of the man that he calls "the Great DiMaggio."

Many other highly-acclaimed 20th century authors, while perhaps not in the pantheon of literary heroes like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, have written memorable novels that incorporated baseball as a central plot point or theme.

The Natural, which was released in 1952, was the first book published by future Pultizer Prize and National Book Award Winner Bernard Malamud. The story of Roy Hobbs was a critical success that launched Malamud's career as a novelist. Many readers found the book's ending a bit too dark, though, and by the time the story hit the big screen, a final game thrown to gamblers had been changed to a walk-off home run amidst the fireworks of an exploding stadium, and everybody was happy.

Philip Roth's Great American Novel, a satirical work published in 1973, claims to be the previously untold story of a third major league, known as the Patriot League, which had to be dissolved because of alleged Communist influences that infiltrated the circuit.

W.P. Kinsella's 1982 novel, Shoeless Joe, tells the improbable tale of an Iowa corn farmer who ploughs under his crop, clears his field, and builds a baseball stadium right in the back forty. And he does it so banned Black Sox outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson can return from the other side and play ball once again. It works. The ghosts of Jackson and his banished teammates appear and play ball in a corn field. It seems a little silly, of course, but the novel and the later movie, Field of Dreams, has driven more men to weep in public than anything in the recorded human history.

Baseball is Poetry

Baseball has inspired sportswriters and columnists to write poetry, and it has inspired great poets to write about baseball. Can you think of a more beautiful symbiosis?

In 1888, while writing for William Randolph Hearst's San Franscisco Examiner, columnist Ernest Lawrence Thayer penned a poem entitled Casey at the Bat, the sad tale of a star player who strikes out with the game on the line. The poem garnered modest attention when first published, but gained immortal fame when Vaudeville actor DeWoolf Hopper recited the poem to great melodramatic effect during one of his shows in July of 1888. The rendition was a smash hit and soon became the highlight of Hopper's show. Hopper later claimed that he had recited Casey at the Bat in public more than 10,000 times over a fifty year period.

Franklin Pierce Adams, another famed newspaper columnist and essayist who later became part of the literary sect known as the Algonquin Round Table, penned Baseball's Sad Lexicon in 1910. In the poem, Adams told of a fan's futility of rooting against the Chicago Cubs' legendary double-play combination of "Tinker to Evers to Chance."

Another newspaper man, the famed sportswriter Grantland Rice, published a poem entitled Game Called in 1948. The poem draws parallels between the closing moments of a baseball game with the final hours of life, and concludes that all that matters to eternity is "how one played the game."

Full-time poets have often devoted their talent to writing about the National Pastime. Ogden Nash wrote Line Up for Yesterday in 1949, a poem that used the letters of the alphabet to form the construct of the verse. One such stanza reads:

"C is for Cobb, Who grew spikes and not corn, And made all the basemen, Wish they weren't born."

Several modern award-winning poets like Thomas Michael McDade, Don Angel and Robert L. Harrison have also devoted much of their talents to creating poetic verse about baseball.

Even the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, diverted his attention from writing verse long enough to author a series of critically-acclaimed essays about baseball entitled Fathers Playing Catch with Sons.

Baseball in Non-Fiction and Fact Based Novels

There is no shortage of fine writers who have used non-fiction, or the newer fact-based novel form, to express their thoughts and feelings about baseball and it's unqiue place in American life. In the non-fiction realm, the late David Halberstam's Summer of '49 may stand alone among the great historic baseball books. Close behind are Roger Kahn's enchanting Boys of Summer, Philip Seib's The Player, and Eliot Asinof's tale of the Black Sox Scandal, entitled 8 Men Out.

All are worth a read. Many are worthy of serious study. Some are outright classics.

Go ahead, do it. Read about baseball. It will make the winter months a little bit easier to endure.

The copyright of the article Baseball in American Letters in Baseball is owned by James Lincoln Ray. Permission to republish Baseball in American Letters in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.