The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created

"Yes, back to your last thought. There’s also a great interest with The Big Fella in this day and age where athletes are such celebrities. Babe Ruth was an extraordinary baseball player and Leavy makes that case in the context of the emergence of athletic stardom and celebrity. This is not a mere recounting of statistics; Leavy gives Babe Ruth a place in cultural history. Leavy zeroes in on the agent who set the great baseball player on a nationwide tour, a sort of barnstorming. Essentially, in that radio age, Babe Ruth campaigned to be a modern celebrity. With this fifth 2019 finalist, one can discern a theme in these biographies. These are figures who were attuned to celebrity and to its unique power. Financial reward was part of this calibration, certainly, but with that came the imprimatur of success and a place in history. Speaking as one who personally prefers reading to watching athletic competitions and has always actively avoided any games with round objects, Leavy is an invaluable guide through the world of America’s greatest pastime. I think there is enough baseball for the hard-core aficionados, but this is biography as cultural history. Again, the themes of celebrity develop through Ruth’s slightly creepy agent, but it’s also about a boy with a talent, basically an orphan who went on to great success. In many ways, this is a classic rags to riches story, albeit one with an able assist from a canny agent who came from advertising and was comfortable pitching products. “Isn’t God supposed to be dead? Or is it poetry?” Leavy focuses his biography on the ‘barnstorming tour’ after the 1927 World Series, when huge numbers of people came out to see Ruth and he developed a hold on the American imagination. Avoiding the minutiae about player statistics, rivalries, trades and the nuances of strategy, Leavy focuses on what was happening behind the scenes. She also deals really well with the scandals in his life, including his philandering. She recognises his eagerness to appear with African Americans when it was a fairly brave thing to do. You see him as a kind of limited guy, but also one who came from a horrific childhood so that it was amazing that he made it to where he did, I think. You’re right! Isn’t God supposed to be dead? Or is it poetry? As I reflect over the last years judging biographies, I really do believe that biography as a genre is flourishing and far from wilting away. Please keep in mind that there’s a bit of self-interest at work here—I’m working on a collective biography right now. My sense is that the old-fashioned, cradle-to-grave biographies of Great Men that weigh in at 1,000 pages may be vanishing, but there seems to be a genuine curiosity about how others have tried to make sense of the world. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Biographers have benefited by the proliferation of resources made accessible by technology. There is no substitute for walking in the footsteps of those about whom we are writing, but now we can spend time going to these places rather than devoting days to ill-functioning microfiche machines in freezing cold archives. Until recently, the NBCC placed autobiography/memoir and biography in a single committee. My initial fret about separating them into two weaker categories was unfounded because there’s been a real resurgence in high-quality biographies, and prizes that reward them. There’s also a wonderful group called Bio, the Biographers International Organisation, that goes beyond prizes and supports the genre with resources and a conference devoted to the craft of biography. So, onward biography! And to deciding which of these five wonderful biography finalists will be chosen collectively by the National Book Critics Circle to win the 2019 award in Biography. There were so many other truly excellent biographies this year and so many of them deserve more attention. To answer your question: Biography is far from dead. Biography, like so much literature, evolves and flourishes. As long as we have discerning readers, they will push and elevate the writing and newly energised methods of research and reporting that yield excellent new biographies. The National Book Critics Circle winners will be announced in a public ceremony on March 14, 2019, following a reading by finalists on March 13, 2019. Read more in the best books of 2019 interview series."