George Plimpton | Books, Biography, eBooks, Audiobooks

Books by thisAuthor

(25)

Out of My League
The Classic Hilarious Account of an Amateur's...
A classic of sport, and the first of George Plimpton's remarkable forays into participatory journalism,Out of My Leaguechronicles with wit, charm, and grace what happens when a self-professed amateur wonders how he would fare on a baseball mound in a major league game. On an ordinary afternoon in the third-baseline seats of Yankee Stadium, Plimpton hits on what seems an inspired idea - to get on the mound and pitch a few innings to the All-Stars of the American and National Leagues. What begins as a fun-filled stunt, for the "average man" to pitch in the Big Leagues, comes to a nearly humiliating end. This honest and hilarious tale features Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Whitey Ford, Ralph Houk, Richie Ashburn, and other baseball greats. What happens when America's favorite sports dilettante tries his arm against the likes of Hall-of-Fame baseball players recalls the dreams of diamond heroics of every man who still has the noble heart of youth beating in him and the fears of anyone who has taken a lump or two from life.
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Paper Lion
With his characteristic insight and wit, the Harvard-educated Plimpton recounts his experiences in successfully talking his way into training camp - not as a reporter but as aplayer- with the Detroit Lions, practicing with the team, and actually taking snaps behind center in a preseason game.
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Truman Capote
In Which Various Friends, Enemies,...
He was the most social of writers, and at the height of his career, he was the very nexus of the glamorous worlds of the arts, politics and society, a position best exemplified by his still legendary Black and White Ball. Truman truly knew everyone, and now the people who knew him best tell his remarkable story to bestselling author and literary lion, George Plimpton. Using the oral-biography style that made his Edie (edited with Jean Stein) a bestseller, George Plimpton has blended the voices of Capote's friends, lovers, and colleagues into a captivating and narrative. Here we see the entire span of Capote's life, from his Southern childhood, to his early days in New York; his first literary success with the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms; his highly active love life; the groundbreaking excitement of In Cold Blood, the first "nonfiction novel"; his years as a jet-setter; and his final days of flagging inspiration, alcoholism, and isolation. All his famous friends and enemies are here: C.Z. Guest, Katharine Graham, Lauren Bacall, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, John Huston, William F. Buckley, Jr., and dozens of others. Full of wonderful stories, startlingly intimate and altogether fascinating, this is the most entertaining account of Truman Capote's life yet, as only the incomparable George Plimpton could have done it.
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The Bogey Man
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Open Net
A Proferssional Amatuer in the World of...
In Open Net, another of George Plimpton's inimitable accounts of a fearless amateur braving the world of professional sports, Plimpton takes to the ice as goalie for his beloved Boston Bruins.
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The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair
And Other Excursions and Observations
George Plimpton needed no encouragement. If there was a sport to play, a party to throw, a celebrity to amaze, a fireworks display to ignite, Plimpton was front and center hurling the pitch, popping the corks, lighting the fuse. And then, of course, writing about it with incomparable zest and style. His books made him a legend. The Paris Review, the magazine he founded and edited, won him a throne in literary heaven. Somehow, in the midst of his self-generated cyclones, Plimpton managed to toss off dazzling essays, profiles, and New Yorker "Talk of the Town" pieces. This delightful volume collects the very best of Plimpton's inspired brief "excursions." Whether he was escorting Hunter Thompson to the Fear and Loathing movie premiere in New York or tracking down the California man who launched himself into the upper atmosphere with nothing but a lawn chair and a bunch of weather balloons, Plimpton had a rare knack for finding stories where no one else thought to look. Who but Plimpton would turn up in Las Vegas, notebook in hand, for the annual porn movie awards gala? Among the many gems collected here are accounts of helping Jackie Kennedy plan an unforgettable children's birthday party, the time he improvised his way through amateur night at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater, and how he managed to get himself kicked out of Exeter just weeks before graduation. The grand master of what he called "participatory journalism," George Plimpton followed his bent and his genius down the most unbelievable rabbit holesbut he always came up smiling. This exemplary, utterly captivating volume is a fitting tribute to one of the great literary lives of our time. From the Hardcover edition.
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As Told at the Explorers Club
More Than Fifty Gripping Tales of Adventure
Incorporated in 1905, The Explorers Club in its earliest years met in simple rented rooms. In 1965, the Club bought a Tudor-style mansion on East 70th Street in the historic Upper East Side, where it has remained ever since. Celebrating its centennial anniversary in 2004, today The Explorers Club is an international society dedicated to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration, and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore. This volume is dedicated to the spirit of exploration. Assembled by Club member and literary giant George Plimpton,As Told by the Explorer's Clubwill take you from Amundsen to Lindbergh, from the Arctic to Antarctica, and all points in between.
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Shadow Box
An Amateur in the Ring
Stepping into the ring against light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore, George Plimpton pauses to wonder what ever induced him to became a participatory journalist. Bloodied but unbowed, he holds his own in the bout - and brings back this timeless book on boxing and its devotees, among them Ali, Joe Frazier, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. SHADOW BOX is one of Plimpton's most engaging studies of professional sport, through the eyes of an inquisitive and astute amateur. From the gym, the locker room, ringside, and even in the harsh glare of the ring itself, Plimpton documents what it is to be a boxer, an artist of mayhem, in the finest sports writing of his career.
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Best of Plimpton
Featuring such classic pieces as "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch" and "The Plimpton Small-Ball Theory of Sports Writing"--the smaller the ball the better the writing--this is a rich mix of profiles, essays, and articles from a most talented and unique American literary personality.
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Curious Case of Sidd Finch
In April 1985, Sports Illustrated published an article that stunned the sports community. George Plimpton's 13-page profile of Sidd Finch, a mysterious pitcher who had been signed by the New York Mets and reportedly threw 168 mph, came complete with photos from spring training, scouting reports, and interviews with Mets players and management. A week later, SI apologized to readers around the world for their role in what is generally regarded as the greatest hoax in the history of sports journalism. The magazine had teamed up with the legendary author and Paris Review bon vivant for an April Fool's Day prank of unprecedented proportions. After the success of the article, Plimpton decided to turn the story into a novel — a rousing baseball fairy tale that is considered one of the most memorable sports novels of the last half-century.
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Mad Ducks and Bears
Football Revisited
MAD DUCKS AND BEARS is the engaging companion to George Plimpton's PAPER LION. In this book, Plimptons personal favorite, he rejoins two of his football teammates from the Detroit Lions, lineman John Gordy and Alex Karras, to talk about their careers in this sometimes brutal, always fascinating game. MAD DUCKS AND BEARS is a more reflective, less madcap book than what we have come to expect from Plimpton - but no less truthful and searching.
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Breaking 90
America's favorite golf swing analyst, former champion, and NBC golf commentator shares his wisdom and shot-making skills to help players of all ages and abilities break through the game's most imposing score barrier. Illustrations.
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Edie
American Girl
When Edie was first published, it quickly became an international best-seller and then took its place among the classic books about the 1960s. Edie Sedgwick exploded into the public eye like a comet. She seemed to have it all: she was aristocratic and glamorous, vivacious and young, Andy Warhol’s superstar. But within a few years she flared out as quickly as she had appeared, and before she turned twenty-nine she was dead from a drug overdose. In a dazzling tapestry of voicesfamily, friends, lovers, rivalsthe entire meteoric trajectory of Edie Sedgwick’s life is brilliantly captured. And so is the Pop Art world of the 60s: the sex, drugs, fashion, musicthe mad rush for pleasure and fame. All glitter and flash on the outside, it was hollow and desperate withinlike Edie herself, and like her mentor, Andy Warhol. Alternately mesmerizing, tragic, and horrifying, this book shattered many myths about the 60s experience in America.
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Home Run
An all-star collection of the best fiction and nonfiction writing about baseball's most exciting moment The game of baseball is full of moments of greatness. But no moment during a game elicits the roar of the crowd as does the hitting of a home run. And, as witnessed during the past few seasons, home-run fever has swept the fans and the players. Now George Plimpton, famed sports amateur and chronicler of the game of baseball-among many other sports-collects the best writing about the moment a home run is hit. From a memoir of Ted Williams's 1946 All-Star game homer to a fictional visit Babe Ruth made to Lake Wobegon, from Mark McGwire's 69th and 70th home runs to Hank Aaron's pursuit of the Babe's record to Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World," we see the effects on the athletes and the fans of that ineffable moment when wood hits leather and the ball sails out over the stands. This delightful and absorbing collection is the most complete, most authoritative, and most compelling assemblage of home-run writing ever put together. Includes glorious prose by John Updike, Don DeLillo, Roger Angell, Paul Gallico, Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Robert Creamer, Garrison Keillor, Donald Hall, Rick Reilly, and Rick Telander, among others.
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The Norton Book of Sports
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Beat Writers at Work
Since 1917 The Modern Library prides itself as "The modern Library of the world's Best Books". Its paperback series feature treasured classics, major translations of great works, and rediscoveries of keen literary and historical merit. Featuring introductions by leading writers, stunning translations, scholarly endnotes and reading group guides. Production values emphasize superior quality and readability. Competitive prices, coupled with exciting cover design make these an ideal gift to be cherished by the avid reader. From the pages of The Paris Review and edited by George Plimpton, the Writers at Work interviews, with the great figures of the Beat and Black Mountain movements. Mr. Plimpton and his able cohorts at The Paris Review have cannily chosen this historical moment for the retrieval of this archive, viz., the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac's masterpiece, and also the recent departures of Ginsberg and Burroughs to celestial addresses, and thus we have a real warts-and-all retrospective, ex post facto, Kerouac in the late sixties, Ginsberg (in one of two pieces here) in the late seventies, Bowles in the eighties, Snyder in the nineties, so that the high period of Beat style is well past at the time of these conversations; Plimpton's wisdom here amounts to permitting the language and form of these interviews to persist over the years and thereby accrue historical context, in which we are enabled to see how the Beat praxis (or Black Mountain praxis) is reactive when faced with such forces as Vietnam, hippie culture, eighties consumerism, neglect by literary history, and so forth. --from the Introduction by Rick Moody,William Burroughs (1965)
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Playwrights at Work
The third installment in the Modern Library's Paris Review "Writers at Work" series, this is an all-new gathering of interviews with the most important and compelling playwrights of our time. Their singular takes on their craft, their influences, their lives, the state of contemporary theater, and the tricks of the trade create an illuminating and unparalleled record of the life of the theater itself. "At its best, theater is an antidote to the whiff of barbarity in the millennial air. 'My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching something, react differently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they're alone in their living rooms,' Arthur Miller says here. In the dark, facing the stage, surrounded by others, the paying customer can let himself go; he is emboldened. The theatrical encounter allows a member of the public to think against received opinions. He can submerge himself in the extraordinary, admit his darkest, most infantile wishes, feel the pulse of the contemporary, hear the sludge of street talk turned into poetry. This enterprise can be joyous and dangerous; when the theater's game is good and tense, it is both." --from the Introduction by John Lahr
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The Paris Review
The latest issue of the magazine highlights the art of biography, in interviews with esteemed biographers Robert Caro, David McCullough, and Author Schlesinger, Jr.For the magazine's famous Writers-at-Work series, three of the most prominent practitioners of the art of biography, each the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, have been interviewed. Robert Caro is the author of The Power Broker (1974), the biography of Robert Moses and two volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson. David McCullough is the biographer of Harry S. Truman. And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has written, among many other works, The Age of Jackson (1945); three volumes of' The Age of Roosevelt; and A Thousand Days (1965), winner of a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.This spring's issue also includes reminiscences of literary life in Paris by Richard Wilbur and Norman Mailer, as well as contributions from such distinguished biographers as Antonia Fraser, Philip Ziegler, and Michael Holroyd.
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The Paris Review
Strippable
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Fireworks
A History and Celebration
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