Football: Great Writing About the National Sport

Book excerpt: Men’s Journal’s “Ultimate Football Reading List” “First-rate” sports writing on American football from an all-star line-up that includes Red Smith, Jimmy Breslin, Michael Lewis, and more (Wall Street Journal) Since football’s meteoric rise in the mid-twentieth century, the standout writers on the sport have gone behind and beyond the spectacle to reveal the complexity, the contradictions, and the deeper humanity at the heart of the game. In a landmark collection, The Library of America brings together the very best of their work: gems of deadline reportage, incisive longform profiles of football’s storied figures, and autobiographical accounts by players and others close to the game. Celebrating the sport without shying away from its sometimes devastating personal and social costs, the forty-four pieces gathered here testify to football’s boundless capacity to generate outsized characters and memorable tales.