Fiction class goes deep into baseball literature

Oct. 27, 2025 - There is a literary quality to baseball. From the lyrical of W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe to the irreverence of Jim Bouton's Ball Four, the chronicles of David Halberstam, the eccentricity of Bill Veeck's Veeck As In Wreck and the satire of Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, no sport touches the range of emotions as does baseball.

TWU's English 2153 class, Intro to Fiction, is dipping students into those magic waters.

The class is reading literature connected with baseball, and students created a bulletin board and bookshelves at Denton's South Branch Library, recommending baseball books including picture books, romance, mysteries and nonfiction. They'll also produce reading lists of baseball-related literature.

"We have been trying to read from different genres, as required by the course description, alongside a bit of literary theory to help students learn about elements of fiction and support their analysis of the various things we'll read, together and alone, this term," explained Dundee Lackey, associate professor of English and Rhetoric.

The class began with different versions of "Casey at the Bat" before moving into baseball poetry and short stories, including Kinsella's "The Thrill of the Grass," Eliot Asinof's "The Rookie," Gary Soto's "Baseball in April" and Michael Chabon's "Smoke."

The class's novels will include Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and John Grisham's Calico Joe. They'll also read Richard Greenberg's play Take Me Out before reading Dr. Faustus to compare it to the re-telling of the Faust legend, the 1958 movie Damn Yankees. The semester will end The Natural, reading Bernard Malamud's novel and watching the Robert Redford film.