Literature - Baseball in the Arts

 

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)

Poet, novelist and literary critic. Funded the literary journal The Southern Review in 1935. Received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the novel All the Kings Men and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1958, 1979

Published in the anthology collection Baseball's Best Stories, is Goodwood Comes Back by Robert Penn Warren

Luke Goodwood could always play baseball, but I never could, to speak of. I was little for my age then, but well along in my studies and didn't want to play with the boys my size; I wanted to play with the boys in my class and if it hadn't been for Luke I never would have been able to. He was a pitcher then, like he always has been, and so he would say, "Aw, let him field." When he was pitching, it didn't matter much who was fielding anyway, because there weren't going to be many hits to amount to anything in the first place.

James Thurber (1894-1961)

Cartoonist, author, humorist, journalist, play-write

Best known for his cartoons and short stories published mainly in The New Yorker magazine and collected in numerous books. Several of his works have been adapted into film

You Could Look it Up published Saturday Evening Post, 1941

It all begun when we dropped down to C'lumbus, Ohio from Pittsburgh to play a exhibition game on our way out to St. Louis. It was gettin' on into September, and though we'd been leadin' the league by six, seven game most of the season, we was now in first place by a margin you could'a' got it into the eye of a thimble, bein' only a half a game ahead of St. Louis.

The story tells of Pearl du Montville, a midget thirty-four to thirty-five inches high, swingin' a bamboo cane and smokin' a big cigar...

Eddie Gaedel, standing at 3'7" would not play for the St. Louis Browns until 1951

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Poet, biographer, journalist, editor

3-time Pulitzer Prize winner

Hits and Runs (1918)

I remember the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island

ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness.

And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke

against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island

players were a yellow smoke against the sundown.

And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs

and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song