by Philip Roth
First published 1973
Octogenarian Word Smith, a former sportswriter, is on a mission: to pen the "Great American Novel" and uncover the lost story of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless baseball team to ever play in the big leagues. As Word grapples with the weight of his literary ambitions, he must also confront the tragedy and hilarity that surrounded the Mundys' meteoric rise and mysterious disappearance from the historical record. With a wry, inimitable voice, "The Great American Novel" is a poignant meditation on the power of storytelling to immortalize the forgotten and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, 21st-century
Vibes: poignant, thought-provoking, wry
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: America
Period: Octogenarian
400 pages · Hardcover · Holt Rhinehart and Winston , Canada