Literature and Sport: Crack of the Bat, Roar of the Crowd and Herculean Feats
"The game doesn't change the way you vote or comb your hair or raise your children. It changes nothing but your life."
— Don DeLillo, early draft of Underworld
Sport holds a sacred place in western culture and literature. Writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Tom Stoppard, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Foster Wallace have written about sport. But their works are no mere play-by-play accounts of a ball game or tennis match or prizefight. The competition, spectacle, personal struggle, and exaggerated personalities so characteristic of sport offer writers the perfect backdrop upon which to look deeply into human nature and create literature that transcends sport itself.
This Harry Ransome Center exhibition, Literature and Sport, showcases the literature of sport through fiction, essays, poetry, and plays. Organized by sport, the exhibition highlights some of the finest examples of literary writing about baseball, football, boxing, tennis, cricket, bullfighting, and other sports. Corrected drafts, handwritten manuscripts, letters, photographs, books, art, and other items — all drawn from the Ransom Center's diverse collections — offer visitors a unique, rarely seen view of these works and their authors' creative processes.
Great literary works capture the broad appeal of sport and its ability to transform individuals and society. Through sport, writers explore the complexities of life, from its challenges and disappointments to its great pleasures. Prominent themes in many of the featured works relate to friendship, aggression, failure, honor, humiliation, pride, loss, and hope. Powerful passages are highlighted throughout the exhibition and demonstrate how writers — through their verbal craftsmanship and dexterity — elevate language to literature.
The exhibition celebrates the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the crushing blow, the herculean feat, the triumph, and the thrill of literature and sport. It demonstrates the breadth of the Ransom Center's collections and features the following works among many others:
Baseball
You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris
"Baseball and Writing" by Marianne Moore
Cobb by Lee Blessing
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Boxing
"Fifty Grand" by Ernest Hemingway
Raging Bull by Jake La Motta
The Fight by Norman Mailer
On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates
Bullfighting
Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
"Bullfights and Democracy" by Aldous Huxley
Brave Bulls by Tom Lea
The Corrida at San Feliu by Paul Scott
Cricket
Cricket Country by Edmund Blunden
"Making a Pitch for Cricket" by John Fowles
The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard
"Catch-52" by J. M. Coetzee
Football
"The Fear that Walks by Noonday" by Willa Cather
"The Eighty-Yard Run" by Irwin Shaw
End Zone by Don DeLillo
"56–0" by T. C. Boyle
Tennis
"The Tennis Game" by James Jones
Levels of the Game by John McPhee
Sudden Death by Rita Mae Brown
Infinite Jest and essays by David Foster Wallace
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