ABSTRACT
Despite America’s apparent love affair with sports, a number of American authors ranging from Mark Twain to Ring Lardner and Arthur Miller can be included among canonical figures of anti-sport writing. Another such author is Philip Roth (1933-). His work has largely focused on aspects of identity in modern American life but of significance to this book are his frequent references to the world of sports, notably baseball. Few of his works avoid at least some allusions to one sport or another. This interest is part of a wider concern in his writing with the (mainly male) body, ‘its strength, its frailty and its often ridiculous need’.2 Additionally, it has been said that Roth creates ‘indelible portraits of men embodying and suffering the deformities of American masculinities’3 – mental and physical deformities often brought on by the legacy of involvement in sports. At the same time, however, he is uneasy about modern sport in the USA, in large part the result of his being ill at ease with the USA per se. Several observers have read Roth’s work as being controversial and the widespread admiration for his work has not prevented him from being accused of conservatism, leftism, anti-Semitism, self-hatred, misogyny and pornography.
