Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack and the Tradition of Black Baseball Literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11271894 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emily Rutter, Emily Ruth Rutter (0000-0002-5258-7021, Ball State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 74-93 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlw059 |
| OpenAlex | W2587330705 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
This essay examines Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack (1972)—the first black-authored baseball novel—and argues that it set a significant, though undervalued, precedent in entering the white-dominated field of baseball literature, deftly representing the experience of the dream deferred for black athletes in the post-Jackie Robinson era. Nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, Runner Mack has now fallen out of cultural currency and has yet to gain the critical consideration it merits. As this essay demonstrates, Beckham originated a tradition of black baseball fiction extended by Percival Everett’s novel Suder (1983) that critiques dominant American myths without replacing them with an alternative mythos and/or pantheon of heroes. Whereas August Wilson’s play Fences (1985) and other tales of black baseball praise the unsung heroes of the Negro Leagues, Beckham makes use of satire and surrealism to expose what Roland Barthes terms the “metalanguage” of myth. Putting Runner Mack in dialogue with Suder and Fences, this essay also illuminates these authors’ divergent views when it comes to the role that myth should (Wilson) or should not (Beckham and Everett) play in challenging Anglocentrism and empowering African Americans—views that are suggestive of broader ideological debates that arose in the years after de jure segregation ended but racial inequities continued. This small but nonetheless significant black baseball subgenre, therefore, provides a productive glimpse into these debates as they were filtered through America’s most metaphorically rich sport.
Art · Art history · Dream · Ideology · League · Literature · Mythology · Performance art · Political science · Politics · Praise · White (mutation) · American Sports and Literature · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Sports, Gender, and Society
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |