Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris, Mark Harris (Introduction)

From the Publisher

Henry Wiggen, hero of The Southpaw and the best-known fictional baseball player in America, is back again, throwing a baseball “with his arm and his brain and his memory and his bluff for the sake of his pocket and his family.” More than a novel about baseball, Bang the Drum Slowly is about the friendship and the lives of a group of men as they each learn that a teammate is dying of cancer.
 
Bang the Drum Slowly was chosen as one of the top one hundred sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated and appears on numerous other lists of best baseball fiction. In the introduction to this new Bison Books edition Mark Harris discusses the making of the classic 1973 film starring Robert DeNiro, based on his screen adaptation of the book. Also available in Bison Books editions are The Southpaw, It Looked Like For Ever.

Chicago Tribune

Eric Simonson's beautifully imagined adaptation of Mark Harris' novel is in many ways the stage equivalent of a lusciously layered and moving work of prose literature, a marvel of simplicity in the depth of its feeling, while at the same time a profound reverie on the losing human contest against mortality...confronts death with complexity, never settling for easy sentiment, and is all the more stirring as a result.

Boston Herald

There's no denying the humor and power of the work, nor the audience's three-hankie response...a fascinating textural portrait of our national image.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents