The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz: A

The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz: A Library of America Special Publication

Bill Littlefield (NPR's Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a defintive collectorâ€™s edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story. Like his friend and admirer Red Smith, W. C. Heinz (1915â€“2008) was one of the most distinctive andÂ influential sportswriters of the last century. Though he began his career as a newspaper reporter, Heinz soon moved beyond the confines of the daily column, turning freelance and becoming the first sportwriter to make his living writing for magazines. In doing so he effectively invented the long-form sports story, perfecting a style that paved the way for the New Journalism of the 1960s. His profiles of the top athletes of his day still feel remarkably current, written with a freshness of perception, a gift for characterization, and a finely tuned ear for dialogue. Jimmy Breslin named Heinzâ€™s â€œBrownsville Bumâ€â€”a brief life of Al â€œBummyâ€ Davis, Brooklyn street tough and onetime welterweight champion of the worldâ€”â€œthe greatest magazine sports story Iâ€™ve ever read, bar none.â€ His spare and powerful 1949 column, â€œDeath of a Race Horse,â€ has been called a literary classic, a work of clarity and precision comparable to Hemingway at his best.

Now, for this essential writerâ€™s centennial, Bill Littlefield, the host of NPRâ€™s Only A Game, presents the essential Heinz: thirty-eight columns, profiles, and memoirs from the authorâ€™s personal archive, including eighteen pieces never collected during his lifetime. Though Heinzâ€™s great passion was boxingâ€”the golden era of Rocky Graziano, Floyd Patterson, and Sugar Ray Robinsonâ€”his interests extended to the wide world of sports, with indelible profiles of baseball players (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio), jockeys (George Woolf, Eddie Arcaro), hockey players, football coaches, scouts and trainers and rodeo riders.
Country USA
Manufacturer Library of America
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-03-10
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Library of America
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-03-10
Format	Kindle eBook

The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz: A Library of America Special Publication

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