The Life That Ruth Built; A Biography

Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. Third printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. xiv, 592,[2] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Appendices. A Note on Sources. Index. Cover has some wear. This biography of Babe Ruth is the first serious biography of an American professional athlete by a professional historian. Marshall Smelser earned his Ph.D. at Harvard under the direction of Samuel Eliot Morison, a Pulitzer Prize historian of maritime and American history. Smelser taught at the University of Notre Dame for almost three decades. The author of The Winning of Independence (1973) and other books, he was also a musician and dedicated baseball scholar. For this book, Smelser corresponded with Ruth's surviving contemporaries, such as the Yankee catcher, Bill Dickey. Some of that correspondence Smelser donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which has since digitalized it online. In a March 3, 1972 letter to Dickey, Smelser said he had "to confess that I grew up in central Illinois and there your teams had to be either the Cubs or Cardinals" in the National League or the White Sox or Browns in the American League. He added, "I never was a Yankee fan until I began getting back your answers. I am one now. I speak of the team." He told Dickey that, "Approximately half of the 42 surviving Yankees of the seasons of the 1920-34 have answered my inquiry. This is a sensationally high proportion for an unsolicited questionnaire." Among his respondents, he said there "was general agreement" that a pitcher facing Ruth should "keep the ball up and throw breaking stuff and changes—never a fast ball over the plate". 'One of the best sports biographies ever; Smelser beautifully evokes the life of baseball's most wondrous player and the times he lived in' - Donald Honig, author of "Baseball When the Grass Was Real". 'Although many books have appeared about George Herman Ruth in the past half century, in my opinion Marshall Smelser's leads all the rest. Readers ...will end up knowing the Babe even better than his teammates knew him' - Lawrence S. Ritter, author of "The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It" (1992). 'Smelser's book is one of the first serious biographies of a sports figure, and is still one of the best' - Jules Tygiel, author of "Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy" (1983). 'Smelser demonstrates that a good historian can write good sports history and that good sports history makes good history. Of course Smelser had an ideal subject: Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, the Colossus of Clout, the Bambino. But the author made the most of his opportunity' - Eugene Murdock, "American Historical Review". 'Smelser, who possesses that rare combination of training as a professional historian with a technical knowledge of baseball, has produced a well-written, comprehensive, and interpretive account of one of America's greatest popular heroes, based on research that is as thorough as possible' - Harold Seymour, "Journal of American History"