Book description
"There's a long drive.
It's gonna be.
I believe.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant."
-- Russ Hodges, October 3, 1951
On the fiftieth anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the
World," Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life
characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's
pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Jackie
Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J. Edgar
Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that the
Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated and
excitable, announces the game -- the Giants and the Dodgers at the
Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the
iconic events of the twentieth century is a masterpiece of American
sportswriting.
Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels,
including Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and
Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work,
and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The
Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In October 2012, DeLillo receives the
Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.
