A comprehensive look at a classic work of popular fiction and its hold on the American imagination.

Chris Messenger is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner and Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction; and is the coauthor, with Chet Walker, of Long Time Coming: A Black Athlete's Coming-of-Age in America.