Bang the Drum Slowly is a novel by Mark Harris, a sequel to The Southpaw (1953). It was first published in 1956, and was later made into a 1956 U.S. Steel Hour television adaptation starring Paul Newman and a later film adaptation in 1973.
Harris's narrator Henry "Author" Wiggen, a star pitcher, tells the story of a baseball season with the New York Mammoths (a fictional team based on the New York Giants as noted in the author's book Diamond-The Baseball Writings of Mark Harris) -- a season notable for the team's success but blighted by the Hodgkin's Disease of catcher Bruce Pearson. Wiggen tries to be supportive of Pearson while concealing his illness.
The title comes from the song The Streets of Laredo, sung by one of the ballplayers (Piney Woods, a back-up catcher recently recalled from the minors) at a team gathering. The version of the song that he sings contains the lyrics, "O bang the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly...."
The novel is written in the vernacular, with idiosyncratic awkward writing by the "author" that Harris has "employed," pitcher Henry Wiggen.
The last line of the novel, "From here on in I rag nobody", was ranked number 95 on American Book Review′s "100 Best Last Lines from Novels" in 2008.
Famous quotes containing the word drum:
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)