First read when I was 16. I tried to treat it as a baseball story, which it is, but at a time when I was also doing pretty well with writers like Hermann Hesse, I didn’t get all the bildungsroman undertones. And there are a lot of them.

Henry Wiggen is from a small town in upstate New York. He’s a very talented left-handed pitcher and has the ego to go along with it. Henry paid enough attention in school to learn the basics of writing, and from that he has constructed a unique style: a pastiche of paperback murder mysteries (“quarter books,” he calls them), badly digested Carl Sandburg, a touch of Damon Runyon, and more than a touch of Huckleberry Finn.

On the train to St. Louis I begun a letter home. It is wrote on railroad paper, and it says, “Dear Pop, Would you send me Sam Yale’s book that is laying on the...” That is all the letter writing I done from Aqua Clara through July. Perry come along just then and said there was a card game down in the other car, and I shoved the letter in my bag, thinking I would polish it off later, but then I telephoned from St. Louis instead and never thought about the letter again until I found it amongst my gear a long time later. It is 1 of the souvenirs now, and they come in handy, for they bring back memories of all that happened day by day. There is Pop’s clips in the scrapbook, which is how I remember how the ball games went, plus a good deal of stuff having nothing to do with ball games a-tall but plenty to do with memory.

The whole book has this unique sameness, if I may call it that; any changes (letters from Pop and the eloquent family friend Aaron Webster—who in a slightly different universe would have written The Southpaw—and newspaper columns that Henry decides to include verbatim) stand out in their sheer eloquence. Henry hasn’t mastered the art of transcribing dialogue, so everybody in the book speaks in the same tone: sort of like the cops in Ed McBain’s books, but with no contractions, so everybody says “do not” instead of “don’t.”

This may sound horrible, but it’s effective. After I read Bang the Drum Slowly and, as quickly as I could get a copy, The Southpaw, for the first time, I wrote like Henry Wiggen for about a year. From time to time I reread them (they might be the most reread books of my life), and I’ll write like Henry again for a while.

I no longer follow “real” baseball very seriously, so some of the oddities of Mark Harris’s baseball world (such as the New York Mammoths being perennial contenders without having a AAA farm team; prospects jump to the majors from AA Quad Cities) don’t bother me any more. I am aware that leagues don’t seem to exist. But I think that in my latest (2009) reading, I lit upon another aspect of The Southpaw that I’d missed or avoided for forty years. Henry doesn’t actually join the Mammoths until almost halfway into the book. Before then, he chats about his adolescence and about his time at Quad Cities, and would have had a lot more to say except that Pop and Aaron made him take a lot of it out. He makes several friends at Quad Cities, and all but one make the jump to the Mammoths the following spring. (In a flukey turn of events that is the closest The Southpaw ever gets to being a quarter book, or Henry Wiggen to being a mythological figure, he gets the opening-day start. At least I saw that as mythologizing. More likely, Dutch Schnell knew that his ace, Sad Sam Yale, was over the hill and purposefully scrambled his rotation.) Everything in the first half of the story is fun. But the Mammoths are not fun. From opening day until the end of the book, nothing is exactly what it seems.

There is an overlay of baseball heroics, as Henry fulfills his promise and becomes a dominant pitcher. But he learns some hard lessons about personal responsibility, the meaning of teamwork, and the ways baseball intersects with the greater, and seamier, world outside.

The Southpaw can be moody, but it is rarely grim; Henry’s unique self-expression sees to that. In its unique way, it’s a classic. ( )

The Southpaw is a great & wonderful book which repays reading & rereading. ( )

Mark Harris's four-book series about Henry Wiggen is widely regarded as the best modern baseball fiction, and for good reason. Henry Wiggen, the narrator, is a talented bush-league southpaw with confidence, love of the game, and poor grammar. His talent takes him far, and he finds himself in the starting rotation of the fictitious New York Mammoths. At first, he thinks that the baseball world and he himself are everything he thought they'd be, but as he grows and matures he experiences a number of reality checks. From politics within the organization to encountering racism towards his African-American teammate to becoming a man that his father, his girl, and he can be proud of, Henry experiences all of the usual growing pains on the mound of a baseball field. In the end, he becomes a left-handed hero who gets his girl and writes a book about his journey. Henry Wiggen is the salt of the earth; though not book-smart, he's savvy, charming, and knowledgeable. Once you enter his world, it's difficult to leave, and you finish the book happily aware of the fact that there are three more to come.