1. Sport literature in English has been strongly influenced by the British public-school tradition, where sport is an important element of the training of gentlemen. Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) is a classic here.

2. Dime novels were the great pulp publishing venue of the 19 th century. Mostly text, with a few illustrations, they weren’t exactly comics, but they were precursors of comics.

3. Gilbert Patten (1865-1944) was the most tireless of the dime-novel sport authors of the late 19 th - and early- 20 th centuries. As “Burt L. Standish,” he created the Frank Merriwell series.

4. Frank Merriwell’s brother Dick led a parallel career of impressive sport action.

5. In addition to dime novels, Patten moved into the 20 th century with hard- cover juvenile novels, and under an array of synonyms, produced several book series.

6. The Stratemeyer Syndicate (creators of Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, among many other series) got into the act with the Baseball Joe series (shown is a 1917 entry). Joe Matson, modeled on the New York Giant pitcher Christy Mathewson, led an impossibly dashing career.

7. In the 1910s, sportswriter Ring Lardner began to create fictional sport characters in columns and short stories, laying the groundwork for a popular but serious sport literature for adults.

8. Lardner’s most successful creation was the blustery, irrepressible Jack Keefe, star of the baseball-fiction columns that were collected as the novel You Know Me Al.

9. For the first half of the 20 th century, Lardner was the exception; pulp fiction was the rule.

10. Pulp sport stories almost invariably center on a team that must win a Big Game by surmounting difficulties: interpersonal conflicts, excess age, excess youth, injury, real sins, or false accusations of sins.

11. Movies – first silents and then talkies – were quick to adopt sport themes, often for comic purposes.

12. When literary fiction dealt with sport, it was often blood sport: hunting or fishing, or bullfighting. Ernest Hemingway, who rarely wrote about team sports, was fascinated with all three blood sports.

13. In the 1950s, baseball came to the fore as a metaphor for life in serious literary fiction.

14. In the 1950s and 60s, sport seemed to capture some basic existential themes.

15. Sport biography and memoir, before the 1960s, tended to confirm Americans’ most uncomplicated desire for heroism.

16. By the late 1960s, sport nonfiction punctured myths of heroism, using uncensored language and breaking taboos. Sport also became political, enmeshed in Civil Rights and Sexual Revolution struggles.

17. In the 1960s and 70s, novels about professional football set the tone for a new naturalism in sport fiction.

18. Postmodernism also redefined the sport novel, turning away from gritty realism toward the magical and the supernaturally profane.

19. But it’s not like older genres and modes died out. Matt Christopher wrote scores of gentle- problem sport juveniles with a liberal message in the 1970s.

20. The Reagan era brought a retro trend in sport fiction: messages of redemption replaced those of disillusion (and Hollywood replaced ambivalence with good feelings).

21. It’s always difficult to generalize about the present day: are we living in an era of magic, nostalgia, or cold-blooded naturalism?