It's hard to read an American classic without finding some mention of baseball. The most famous reference is in The Great Gatsby (1925), where Nick Carraway marvels at how Gatsby's associate Meyer Wolfshiem fixed the 1919 World Series “with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.” In the great novel of the American Dream, it seems inevitable that Nick Carraway's musings on innocence and disillusionment should encompass baseball. Allusions to baseball range from a mention of Arnold Rothstein – the real-life model for Fitzgerald's Wolfshiem – in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), to a chapter relating a rowdy game at the Polo Grounds in E. L. Doctorow 's Ragtime (1975). Marianne Moore and Robert Pinsky, among many others, have written poetry about baseball, and a leading character in one of August Wilson 's most important plays, Fences (1983), is a former player in the Negro Leagues. A rich tradition of American nonfiction about baseball includes work by Donald Hall and John Updike.

While baseball allusions and work in other genres offer rewarding venues for criticism, this chapter focuses specifically on fiction devoted to the game. It will introduce the most accomplished examples from the relatively small canon of literary fiction about baseball, but will suggest that these can best be understood in relationship to a much larger body of juvenile, pulp, and genre fiction about baseball. Baseball writing existed largely in the realm of the popular in the first half of the twentieth century, but after World War ii there evolved a recognizable high-art tradition as well.