Probably no other sport has inspired as much American literature as baseball: countless fiction writers, poets, essayists, screenwriters and and playwrights have, for well over a century, used baseball as an essential ingredient in their art. In this course, we will read, discuss, and write about works that feature baseball, considering how the sport serves to deepen and complicate portrayals of America life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Authors may include Don DeLillo, B. H. Fairchild, Donald Hall, W. P. Kinsella, Bernard Malamud, Gail Mazur, Marianne Moore, Emily Nemens, August Wilson, Tobias Wolff, and many others.

This course is writing intensive. Students will draft a number of short response papers, two of which will be revised and expanded into longer essays of at least five pages.