Bang the Drum Slowly

by Mark Harris, Mark Harris (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803273382
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	12/01/2003
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	243
Sales rank:	321,917
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mark Harris (1922-2007) is the author of a famous quartet of baseball novels—including It Looked Like Forever—as well as Something about a Soldier, Speed, and The Talemaker. All are available as Bison Books.

Editorial Reviews

“Bang the Drum Slowly makes wonderful reading—whether one hates baseball or loves it. . . . It is awfully funny in parts, and laughter is rare enough on anybody’s bookshelf.”—New York Times

New York Times

“What makes Bang the Drum Slowly unique . . . is author Harris’s mastery of his offbeat scene. . . . The talk is natural, larded with casual humor, and earthiness. . . . Harris has measured [his characters] with his heart as well as his eye and ear.”—Time

Time

“What makes Bang the Drum Slowly unique . . . is author Harris’s mastery of his offbeat scene. . . . The talk is natural, larded with casual humor, and earthiness. . . . Harris has measured [his characters] with his heart as well as his eye and ear.”—Time

Time

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.

Chicago Tribune

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.

Boston Herald

"Bang the Drum Slowly is more than just another novel about baseball. It is about friendship, about the lives of a group of men as one by one they learn that a teammate is dying. Henry's dead-pan, vernacular account of life in the dugout is refreshing, lively and often uproariously funny. His reactions to his doomed friend are poignant and profoundly touching. Bang the Drum Slowly is a fine bitter-sweet book."—New York Herald Tribune

New York Herald Tribune

"[Bang the Drum Slowly] has one of the loveliest last lines in American literature, a regret from Wiggen for the way the players made fun of a slow-witted and now dead teammate: ‘From here on in, I rag nobody.’ We could all use that on our coat of arms."—George Vecsey, The New York Times

New York Times - George Vecsey