Mark Harris and the Wiggen novels

Source: erictheblue.typepad.com --- Monday, January 01, 2018
Mark Harris, who died in 2007, is best known, as this NYT obit indicates, as the author of a series of novels about a fictional major-league Baseball pitcher, Henry Wiggen.  There are four Wiggen books in all:  The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), and It Looked Like Forever (1979).  Bang the Drum Slowly is the most widely known, for it was made into a 1973 movie starring Michael Moriarty, of Law & Order fame, as Wiggen, and Robert DeNiro as his  teammate Bruce Pearson, who is dying of Hodgkin's disease.  Harris wrote the screenplay.  I didn't know until looking things up just now that there is a local angle to a couple of these careers.  Moriarty acted on the stage of the Guthrie Theatre here in Minneapolis for four seasons at the beginning of his career, and Harris took a PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 1956.  It thus appears likely, from the dates, that at least portions of The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly were written in Minneapolis.   Of the Wiggen books, my favorite is It Looked Like Forever , wherein Wiggen is unceremoniously released from the New York Mammoths after a 19-year, Hall-of-Fame-worthy career.  At 39, he has bladder problems and blood in his seminal fluid--conditions, one might speculate, more apt to afflict the 57-year-old author than the 39-year-old professional athlete.  The first three books, all published in the 1950s, describe W ...

from Baseball http://ift.tt/2CrIZtN