Read The Southpaw Storyline:
With The Southpaw, novelist Mark Harris begins the remarkable saga of a gifted baseball pitcher named Henry W. Wiggen, which would unfold in four novels over the course of some 27 years between the publication of The Southpaw (1952) and It Looked Like For Ever (1979). Harris frames The Southpaw in an irresistible way, letting the fictional hero Wiggen "tell" his own story in the vernacular—bad grammar, run-on sentences, the works. In fact, the title page tells the reader that The Southpaw is "by Henry W. Wiggen / Punctuation freely inserted and spelling greatly improved by Mark Harris."Henry Wiggen is a beautiful athlete, but despite his talents and his natural grace, the unpretentious small-town boy reaches manhood by the same arduous route followed by most boys, complicated in his case by that very talent and grace, and the expectations they create in everyone. Wiggen is that rarest of fiction heroes, a certifiable good guy, without...Pages of The Southpaw :