Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Great Baseball Stories | 1990 | James T. Farrell | Buy |
Great Baseball Stories was published in 1990, over a decade after James T. Farrell’s death in 1979. The anthology brings together writing about baseball from a range of American authors, and Farrell’s inclusion reflects his long association with the sport in his fiction. Baseball appears throughout his work, from the sandlot games in the Studs Lonigan and Danny O’Neill novels to his posthumous novel Dreaming Baseball, which centers on a White Sox pitcher during the 1919 season.
Farrell grew up watching games at Comiskey Park and remained a devoted fan throughout his life. His writing about baseball tends toward the same social realism he applied to everything else, treating the sport as part of the fabric of neighborhood life rather than romanticizing it. This anthology places his work alongside other writers who found in baseball a subject worth serious literary attention.