The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. by Robert Coover

Considered one of the best baseball novels of all time, this black comedy about a discontented businessman's obsession with a fantasy baseball league of his own creation is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" meets William Gaddis meets John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

Somewhere in a "major-league" American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh--no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan. The most important part of Waugh's life, as far as he is concerned, is lived in his head, where he is sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, which is now entering its fifty-sixth season. The games are played with dice and scorecards, and the players are just numbers and names, but for Waugh they're more real than the dreary office, the dive bar, and the dingy apartment in which he spends his days. Still, being sole proprietor is a lonely business, and when a few rolls of the dice spell tragedy for the rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford--a player Waugh believes will reinvigorate the game--the whole association is imperiled, along with the sanity of its isolated creator.

Robert Coover's fiction was a map of America, and The Universal Baseball Association is smack-dab in the center of it. Baseball, in Waugh's world, is an escape, and Waugh is nothing if not an all-American escapist with a capacity for denial so profound that it can only be called optimism.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9798896230182
Title	The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.
Author	Robert Coover
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	New York Review of Books
Year published	2026-03-17
Number of pages	264
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.