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 First edition cover | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Holt, Rinehart & Winston |
Publication date | 1973 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 382 |
| ISBN | 978-0030045165 |
| OCLC | 664849 |
| Preceded by | Our Gang |
| Followed by | My Life as a Man |
The Great American Novel is a novel by Philip Roth, published in 1973.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer.
The novel concerns the Patriot League, a fictional American baseball league, and the national Communist conspiracy to eliminate its history because it has become a fully open communist organization.
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country comprising 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Baseball is a bat-and-ball game played between two opposing teams who take turns batting and fielding. The game proceeds when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball which a player on the batting team tries to hit with a bat. The objectives of the offensive team are to hit the ball into the field of play, and to run the bases—having its runners advance counter-clockwise around four bases to score what are called "runs". The objective of the defensive team is to prevent batters from becoming runners, and to prevent runners' advance around the bases. A run is scored when a runner legally advances around the bases in order and touches home plate. The team that scores the most runs by the end of the game is the winner.
The Port Ruppert Mundys of New Jersey lease their stadium to the United States Department of War at the beginning of the 1943 season—to be used as a soldiers' embarkation point—which forces the athletes to play as the league's first permanent road team. The novel's narrator is "Word" Smith, a retired sports columnist who spends 1943 traveling with the Mundys.
The United States Department of War, also called the War Department, was the United States Cabinet department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army, also bearing responsibility for naval affairs until the establishment of the Navy Department in 1798, and for most land-based air forces until the creation of the Department of the Air Force on September 18, 1947.
Characters on the Mundys roster are parallels of actual replacement players from the World War II era, such as one-armed outfielder Bud Parusha (Pete Gray).
World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.
Peter J. Gray was an American professional baseball outfielder who played for the St. Louis Browns of Major League Baseball in 1945, despite having lost his right arm in a childhood accident.
In 2003, USA Today critic Bob Minzesheimer called the work "one of Roth's least known," and added, [1]
USA Today is an internationally distributed American daily, middle-market newspaper that serves as the flagship publication of its owner, the Gannett Company. The newspaper has a generally centrist audience. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, it operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters on Jones Branch Drive, in McLean, Virginia. It is printed at 37 sites across the United States and at five additional sites internationally. Its dynamic design influenced the style of local, regional, and national newspapers worldwide, through its use of concise reports, colorized images, informational graphics, and inclusion of popular culture stories, among other distinct features.
Daniel Okrent once wrote that if "40 percent of The Great American Novel is out-of-control, the remainder is unmitigated triumph. Roth turned the screw of fantasy and myth one notch higher than others and ended up with a work far truer to the sport: He knew his target, loved it dearly, and knew as well what exaggerations it could withstand."
Roth, best known for Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral , won a life-achievement medal last fall at the National Book Awards. At the reception, I told him how much I enjoyed The Great American Novel nearly 30 years ago. He laughed and said it's usually the precocious teen sons of friends who tell him that. But he said no novel was more fun to write.Daniel Okrent is an American writer and editor.
Portnoy's Complaint is a 1969 American novel by Philip Roth. Its success turned Roth into a major celebrity, sparking a storm of controversy over its explicit and candid treatment of sexuality, including detailed depictions of masturbation using various props including a piece of liver. The novel tells the humorous monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," who confesses to his psychoanalyst in "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language." Many of its characteristics went on to become Roth trademarks.
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk".
The Human Stain (2000) is a novel by Philip Roth set in late 1990s rural New England. Its first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appeared in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain. Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character created by the writer Philip Roth, who uses him as his protagonist and narrator, a type of alter ego, in many of his novels.
Patrick George Hentgen is an American former professional baseball pitcher, and currently a special assistant with the Toronto Blue Jays organization. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Blue Jays, St. Louis Cardinals, and Baltimore Orioles.
William Thomas Harris III is an American writer, best known for a series of suspense novels about his most famous character, Hannibal Lecter. The majority of his works have been adapted into films and television, the most notable being The Silence of the Lambs, which became only the third film in Academy Awards history to sweep the Oscars in major categories.
Joshua Gibson was an American Negro league baseball catcher. Baseball historians consider Gibson to be among the very best power hitters and catchers in the history of any league, including Major League Baseball (MLB). In 1972, he became the second Negro league player to be inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Robert William Andrew Feller, nicknamed "The Heater from Van Meter", "Bullet Bob", and "Rapid Robert", was an American baseball pitcher who played 18 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Cleveland Indians. Feller pitched from 1936 to 1941 and from 1945 to 1956, interrupted only by a four-year engagement in the Navy. In a career spanning 570 games, Feller pitched 3,827 innings and posted a win–loss record of 266–162, with 279 complete games, 44 shutouts, and a 3.25 earned run average (ERA).
Henry Ramón Blanco is a Venezuelan professional baseball coach and former player. He is currently the bullpen coach for the Washington Nationals. He played as a catcher in Major League Baseball from 1997 to 2013, appearing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Colorado Rockies, Milwaukee Brewers, Atlanta Braves, Minnesota Twins, Chicago Cubs, San Diego Padres, New York Mets, Arizona Diamondbacks, Toronto Blue Jays, and Seattle Mariners. He later served as quality assurance coach for the Cubs. Although a light-hitting player, he was regarded as one of the best defensive catchers in Major League Baseball.
William George Evans, nicknamed "The Boy Umpire", was an American umpire in Major League Baseball who worked in the American League from 1906 to 1927. He became, at age 22, the youngest umpire in major league history, and later became the youngest to officiate in the World Series at age 25.
Ellis Weiner is an author and humorist who has previously worked as an editor of National Lampoon and a columnist for Spy Magazine. His humor has also appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine.
Thomas Flynn Gordon, nicknamed "Flash", is a former Major League Baseball right-handed pitcher.
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic, and editor from New Orleans who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death. He had moved to Brooklyn, New York, with his family as a youth.
Theodore Philip Toynbee was a British writer and communist. He wrote experimental novels, and distinctive verse novels, one of which was an epic called Pantaloon, a work in several volumes, only some of which are published. He also wrote memoirs of the 1930s, and reviews and literary criticism, the latter mainly via his employment with The Observer newspaper.
Man at the Crossroads (1934) was a fresco by Diego Rivera in New York City's Rockefeller Center. It was originally slated to be installed in the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the main building of the center. Man at the Crossroads showed the aspects of contemporary social and scientific culture. As originally installed, it was a three-paneled artwork. A central panel depicted a worker controlling machinery. The central panel was flanked by two other panels, The Frontier of Ethical Evolution and The Frontier of Material Development, which respectively represented socialism and capitalism.
Leonard Joseph Okrie was an American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball. Born in Detroit, Okrie stood 6'2" (188 cm) tall, weighed 185 pounds (84 kg), and batted and threw right-handed.
Sheldon "Chief" Bender was an American player and manager in minor league baseball and a scout, scouting director and farm system director in Major League Baseball who spent 64 years in the game.
The Humbling is a novel by Philip Roth published in the fall of 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is Roth's 30th book and concerns "an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by a 'counterplot of unusual erotic desire'."
Michael Thomas Roth is an American professional baseball pitcher who is currently a free agent. He previously played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Chicago Cubs.
Calico Joe is John Grisham's first baseball novel. It was released on April 10, 2012.
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