• Sport literature in English has been strongly influenced by the British public-school tradition, where sport is an important element of the training of gentlemen. Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) is a classic here.

• Dime novels were the great pulp publishing venue of the 19th century. Mostly text, with a few illustrations, they weren’t exactly comics, but they were precursors of comics.

• Gilbert Patten (1865-1944) was the most tireless of the dime-novel sport authors of the late 19th- and early-20th centuries. As “Burt L. Standish,” he created the Frank Merriwell series.

• Frank Merriwell’s brother Dick led a parallel career of impressive sport action.

• In addition to dime novels, Patten moved into the 20th century with hard-cover juvenile novels, and under an array of synonyms, produced several book series.

• The Stratemeyer Syndicate (creators of Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, among many other series) got into the act with the Baseball Joe series (shown is a 1917 entry). Joe Matson, modeled on the New York Giant pitcher Christy Mathewson, led an impossibly dashing career.

• In the 1910s, sportswriter Ring Lardner began to create fictional sport characters in columns and short stories, laying the groundwork for a popular but serious sport literature for adults.

• Lardner’s most successful creation was the blustery, irrepressible Jack Keefe, star of the baseball-fiction columns that were collected as the novel You Know Me Al.

• For the first half of the 20th century, Lardner was the exception; pulp fiction was the rule.

• Pulp sport stories almost invariably center on a team that must win a Big Game by surmounting difficulties: interpersonal conflicts, excess age, excess youth, injury, real sins, or false accusations of sins.

• Movies – first silents and then talkies – were quick to adopt sport themes, often for comic purposes.

When literary fiction dealt with sport, it was often blood sport: hunting or fishing, or bullfighting. Ernest Hemingway, who rarely wrote about team sports, was fascinated with all three blood sports.

• In the 1950s, baseball came to the fore as a metaphor for life in serious literary fiction.

• In the 1950s and 60s, sport seemed to capture some basic existential themes.

• Sport biography and memoir, before the 1960s, tended to confirm Americans’ most uncomplicated desire for heroism.

• By the late 1960s, sport nonfiction punctured myths of heroism, using uncensored language and breaking taboos. Sport also became political, enmeshed in Civil Rights and Sexual Revolution struggles.

• In the 1960s and 70s, novels about professional football set the tone for a new naturalism in sport fiction.

• Postmodernism also redefined the sport novel, turning away from gritty realism toward the magical and the supernaturally profane.

• But it’s not like older genres and modes died out. Matt Christopher wrote scores of gentle- problem sport juveniles with a liberal message in the 1970s.

• The Reagan era brought a retro trend in sport fiction: messages of redemption replaced those of disillusion (and Hollywood replaced ambivalence with good feelings).

• It’s always difficult to generalize about the present day: are we living in an era of magic, nostalgia, or cold-blooded naturalism?