The definitive account of the life and tragic death of baseball legend Lou Gehrig.

Lou Gehrig was a baseball legend?the Iron Horse, the stoic New York Yankee who was the greatest first baseman in history, a man whose consecutive-games streak was ended by a horrible disease that now bears his name. But as this definitive new biography makes clear, Gehrig's life was more complicated?and, perhaps, even more heroic?than anyone really knew.

Drawing on new interviews and more than two hundred pages of previously unpublished letters to and from Gehrig, Luckiest Man gives us an intimate portrait of the man who became an American hero: his life as a shy and awkward youth growing up in New York City, his unlikely friendship with Babe Ruth (a friendship that allegedly ended over rumors that Ruth had had an affair with Gehrig's wife), and his stellar career with the Yankees, where his consecutive-games streak stood for more than half a century. What was not previously known, however, is that symptoms of Gehrig's affliction began appearing in 1938, earlier than is commonly acknowledged. Later, aware that he was dying, Gehrig exhibited a perseverance that was truly inspiring; he lived the last two years of his short life with the same grace and dignity with which he gave his now-famous ?luckiest man? speech.

Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Jonathan Eig's Luckiest Man shows us one of the greatest baseball players of all time as we've never seen him before.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Survivor

Chapter 2: "Babe" Gehrig

Chapter 3: At Columbia

Chapter 4: The Behemoth of Bing

Chapter 5: Goodbye, Mr. Pipp

Chapter 6: Coming of Age

Chapter 7: Sinner and Saint

Chapter 8: Barnstorming Days

Chapter 9: A Charmed Life

Chapter 10: The Crash

Chapter 11: Iron Horse

Chapter 12: Courtship

Chapter 13: Out of the Shadows

Chapter 14: A Night at the Opera

Chapter 15: The Next Big Thing

Chapter 16: Lord of the Jungle

Chapter 17: Strange Times

Chapter 18: The Longest Summer

Chapter 19: Like a Match Burning Out

Chapter 20: Last Chance

Chapter 21: Pitchers Once Feared His Bat

Chapter 22: The Bitter with the Sweet

Chapter 23: Luckiest Man

Chapter 24: The Bureaucrat

Chapter 25: Our Boy Is Pretty Discouraged

Chapter 26: He Was Baseball

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Lou Gehrig's Career Statistics

Notes

Index