A Farewell to Heroes by Frank Graham
Originally published in 1981 and long out of print, A Farewell to Heroes covers five unforgettable decades of the New York sporting life from 1915 to 1965. Told initially from the point of view of Frank Graham, premier sportswriter for The New York Sun. This dual autobiography also includes the writings of Frank, Jr., who picks up the narrative as he becomes a sports journalist in his own right. Frank Graham, Sr., was a self-taught writer known for his uncanny ability to capture the high drama of a game-winning play or the color of a fight mob's conversation in spare, straightforward prose. As a reporter, he covered the rough-and-tumble Giants of John McGraw's day and continued through boxing's greatest era, spanning the reigns of Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. As the younger Frank tells more of the story, we watch Lou Gehrig take Babe Ruth's place as the Yankees' star and then trace his glorious career to its tragic conclusion. We see firsthand the legendary Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson and boxing's brief but golden age on television in the 1950s. Aided by sixteen photographs and preserving the most masterful of his father's writing while adding to it the best of his own, Frank Graham, Jr., has given the sports fan A Farewell to Heroes, perhaps the ultimate sports reminiscence of a time when the romance of sport gave life a golden hue, when heroes still roamed the earth.
A Farewell to Heroes is an attempt to re-create an atmosphere, to set down not a history of sports during that half century or so but a kind of dual autobiography, a very selective overview, gold-tinted perhaps but as honest as my father and I could make it, of an era that now comes dimmering up out of the mists- Frank Graham, Jr., from the Preface
In what he calls this 'kind of dual autobiography,' he is his father's son, having learned to look and listen as his father did and still go his own way, says W. C. Heinz, longtime sportswriter for The New York Sun, in his new foreword to this paperback edition. As a sportswriter, Frank Graham, Jr., has published four books and numerous articles for Sports Illustrated, Sport, The New Republic, Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Times Magazine. Turning later to an interest in natural history and conservation, he wrote eight more books, including Since Silent Spring, The Adirondacks, and Where the Place Called Morning Lies. He is currently a field editor for Audubon and, along with his wife, Ada, has written more than two dozen books for children.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780809324910 |
| ISBN 10 | 0809324911 |
| Title | A Farewell to Heroes |
| Author | Frank Graham |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Southern Illinois University Press |
| Year published | 2003-03-31 |
| Number of pages | 344 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |