Meet
JANE LEAVY
discussing
The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World he Created
Saturday, September 28, 7pm
Books & Books, Coral Gables
Winner of the 2019 SABR Seymour Medal | Finalist for the PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award | Finalist for the NBCC Award for Biography
“In the 1920s, Babe Ruth was a new kind of public man, a personification of modern America. He not only reinvented baseball with mighty uppercut swings, ushering in the age of home runs. He also relentlessly insisted on living on his own terms: getting paid as he deserved, consuming as he pleased, crafting his own image, reveling in celebrity. In her engaging biography Jane Leavy writes that Ruth “exploded notions of the doable.”” – The Washington Post
After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927, Babe Ruth embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. Walsh called the tour a “Symphony of Swat.” In The Big Fella (Harper, $32.50), acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and in so doing captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth’s life and times.
Drawing from a trove of previously untapped documents, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man.
Jane Leavy, award-winning former sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post, is author of the New York Times bestsellers Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, and the comic novel Squeeze Play. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Truro, Massachusetts.