This conversation seeks to understand the journey of baseball from the field to the page, where deeply personal connections are translated into text, resonating with readers across generations.

Participants include: Morris Dickstein, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is also the founder and Senior Fellow of the Center for the Humanities; author Eric Rolfe Greenberg who wrote The Celebrant, one of Sports Illustrated‘s Top 100 Sports Books of All Time; and journalist and bestselling author Jane Leavy (Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood).

Exploring Baseball Series also includes:
Jackie Robinson: Outsider Hero (May 8)
Baseball in America Today (May 28)
Dreamers and Doers: Kim Ng (June 11)

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Morris Dickstein is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a widely published reviewer and critic, perhaps best known for his book on the 1960s, Gates of Eden (1977, 1997) and Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009), both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Dancing in the Dark also received the 2010 Ambassador Book Award in American Studies from the English-Speaking Union. His other recent books include Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 (2002) and A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (2005). He has served as vice-chair of the New York Council for the Humanities, on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

Eric Rolfe Greenberg is the author of The Celebrant (1983), which Sports Illustrated listed among the top 50 sports books of all time, third among baseball fiction. The novel is currently available from Bison Books. Born and raised in New York, Mr. Greenberg attended the University of Wisconsin and, after naval service, New York University’s School of the Arts. He worked as a publicist for major film studios and as marketing director for magazine and book publishers. He joined the American Management Association in 1981 and continued in a variety of positions at AMA, including research editor, before becoming Director of Management Studies in 1988, delivering survey findings in print and through media appearances and interviews as well as presentations to national conferences and conventions and, on six occasions, to committees of the U.S. Congress. He left AMA in late 2001. Mr. Greenberg lives on the Upper West Side of New York City.

Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, and the comic novel Squeeze Play, “the best novel ever written about baseball” (Entertainment Weekly). As a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, she covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, ESPN’s Grantland and Sports Illustrated. Her work has been anthologized extensively, most recently in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame and Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team. A graduate of Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she wrote her master’s essay (later published in The Village Voice) on her childhood hero, Red Smith, the late sports columnist for The New York Times.