Frank MacShane prefaces the first full-length biography of Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) with a warning that he is “treating Raymond Chandler as a novelist and not simply as a detective-story writer.” If only it were that easy. The tension between genre fiction and self-consciously literary writing animated – and irritated – Chandler for his entire writing career. Though he did not publish his first novel until he was past fifty, that career spanned the possibilities for an American writer at midcentury, from literary fiction to mass market paperbacks, with the wild card of the movies thrown in.

At his peak, Chandler transcended the crime genre within which he honed and practiced his craft. He was praised by the literati, imitated widely by his crime writer peers, and avidly read by the general public – all before his most ambitious book, The Long Goodbye (1953), even appeared.

No one would have predicted such success for Raymond Chandler in the early years of his career. Though he was once a hot prospect, the sales of Chandler’s early books discouraged him and his publisher. His reversal of fortune says something about the enduring qualities of his writing, especially his great creation, the private investigator Philip Marlowe. But it also tells us a lot about the workings of the American literary marketplace at a dynamic historical moment, and about the genre with which Raymond Chandler will, for better and worse, always be identified. Chandler’s ups and downs are a story with its own sense of mystery. You could call it “the alchemy of a best seller.”

Hundreds of thousands of novels have been published since the first novel was written by a North American in the early days of the republic. Between 1789 and 1800, about thirty novels written by Americans were published in the United States, at a time when “American” meant something very different, and much less separate, from what it means now. During that period about 350 other titles were published, creating a distinctly transatlantic (and very British) literary landscape. As late as 1875, the number of novels both written and published in the United States had never exceeded 175 per year. Not until the 1880s, in a booming economy – now featuring what has been termed “the industrial book” – did new American fiction titles exceed 1,000 per year. The numbers have been climbing exponentially ever since, flagging only slightly during economic downturns. The total had doubled again by the 1950s, and again by the 1980s. It had doubled yet again by the 1990s, and once more in the 2000s. At this writing, near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a book of fiction is being published in the United States every hour, on average (and that figure excludes vanity press and self-publishing ventures). That's more than 10,000 works of fiction – mostly novels – each year. Not only do rumors of the death of the novel appear greatly exaggerated, but these numbers alone (and the swiftly shifting landscape they portend) suggest that we need to consider the history of the novel anew.

Pearls Before Swine, a daily comic strip written by Californian Stephan Pastis and syndicated in more than 500 newspapers, ran a series of strips in 2005 in which one of the characters, a bear, goes on a cross-country trip to “try and find the one person who can bring this divided country together.” That person turns out to be Willie Mays. “You were baseball, Mr. Mays,” says the bear. “You were the greatest player in the history of the game and an icon of a past era that somehow seems better than today.”

The bear's view of baseball – and its inverse – lie at the heart of this book. Like many observers, the bear sees baseball as special compared to other games, and he sees baseball's glorified past as mythically different from, yet somehow still deeply connected to, its fallen present. Moreover, baseball history somehow corresponds to American history in the bear's mind: the game's great past is also the nation's. So he thinks the person most qualified to rescue the country is a long-retired baseball player.

This link to national character sets baseball apart from other American sports. It arises from baseball’s much-heralded reputation as the “national pastime,” but the meaning of that epithet is as hazy as that of “American Dream,” another pneumatic concept that fl oats in the same precincts. (“National pastime” is in fact the older of the two terms, dating back to baseball’s nineteenth-century beginnings. “American Dream” was coined during the Depression.) Like “American Dream,” the idea of a national pastime conjures up inchoate yet idealized visions – equal parts myth and pastoral fantasy. These visions always inform, and frequently distort, views of past and present together.

We begin our discussion of baseball greatness by considering Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose career record should speak for itself. Stowe is the author of the abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the bestselling American book of the entire nineteenth century and probably the most read work of American literature ever. It's also the book that the phrase “the great American novel” was invented to describe. Yet despite Stowe's overwhelming popularity and immense influence in her time and beyond it, literary arbiters – critics and scholars – didn't respect her work, so she was read in few American literature classrooms until a generation ago. Simply put, her work wasn't considered worthy of inclusion in the American literary canon, not considered sufficiently “great” to assign to the nation's youth.

Babe Ruth never had this problem. The most famous baseball player in history, Ruth has been the very measure of greatness in baseball, and also in other sports. Even a contemporary giant like Michael Jordan has often been called the “Babe Ruth of basketball.” Ruth was canonized from the start, and even though all of his most famous records have been broken, his iconic status has never been threatened.