Title: Making the team
First published: 1997
Description: Timothy Morris examines the cultural implications of baseball novels, focusing on four themes - assimilation, heterosexuality, language, and meritocracy - from among many possibilities "because they are particularly problematic issues for America and Americanists in the mid-1990s.".

While Making the Team deals with canonical works such as The Natural and Bang the Drum Slowly, it devotes equal attention to juvenile novels by John Tunis (The Kid from Tomkinsville, Young Razzle) and others. Throughout, Morris considers how the ideals of manliness, courage, competitiveness, athleticism, whiteness, and standard English - of "Americanness" in its many facets - have been embodied in fictional characters for readers of different ages and in different eras.

He concludes with a chapter that asks, "What does it mean to be 'literary'?" What distinguishes "high art" from a baseball novel, or a mystery, or a romance novel, or pornography? Making the Team suggests that drawing the line may be a more vital concern - not just for scholars, but for Americans at large - than anything critics have argued about for a very long time.
Subjects: American Baseball stories, American Psychological fiction, American fiction, Assimilation (Sociology) in literature, Baseball in literature, Baseball stories, American, Bildungsromans, Children's stories, American, Elite (Social sciences) in literature, Heterosexuality in literature, History, History and criticism, Literature and society, Maturation (Psychology) in literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, Psychological fiction, American, Social status in literature, American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, Psychological fiction, history and criticism, National characteristics in literature, Children's literature, history and criticism, American Bildungsromans
Places: United States
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PS374.B37 M35 1997