School will be back in session before we know it, and this fall, I will be sitting in on a class at the University of Kansas called “The Literature of Baseball.” I won’t actually be taking the class for credit, but I contacted the instructor for the course and managed to get permission to sit in on the class. Naturally, I’ll be reading the material as well.
Suffices to say, I am ridiculously excited about this.
The class is taught by James Carothers, an English professor at KU. He has been teaching the course for decades, and apparently even taught Bill James when James was at KU. I found a great article about Dr. Carothers and the class that was published a few years ago here.
The booklist for the class is as follows:
– Baseball: A Literary Anthology, ed. Nicholas Dawidoff
– The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg
– Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
– The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter
– I Had A Hammer, by Hank Aaron
– The Natural, by Bernard Malamud
