'So, it was very gratifying to see how it was received. “I hoped that football fans would recognise themselves in it,” Hornby tells GOAL. Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1984.Nick Hornby’s 'Fever Pitch' is also considered by many critics as the book that redefined the football-writing genre following its publication in 1992.Īnd it’s still as popular now as it was all those years ago when it landed on the shelves and told the story of Hornby’s obsession with Arsenal as he grew from boy to man while standing on the Highbury terraces. 'Frank Waters’s The Lizard Woman and the Emergence of the Dawn Man.' Western American Literature, vol.

Its emotional impact was so profound, I was impelled to give voice to it with pencil and paper.Ĭomparing the novel’s narrative arc – “a nightmare journey into desolation and its paradoxical illumination … result in dislocation from history and society but also in a new sense of relationship to the universe ” – to works by Melville, Frost, Poe, and Conrad, critic Alexander Blackburn notes that the book foreshadows the author’s major themes of 'unity, duality, and emergence.' Issued by Horace Liveright, one of the most interesting publishers of the 1930s, the book is seldom found in jacket. After having lived all of my early years in the high Rockies of California, I was unprepared for the vast sweep of sunstruck desert with its flat wastes, clumps of cacti, and barren parched-rock ranges. During my stay there I made a horseback trip down into the little-known desert interior of Lower California. The novel was begun in 1926, when I was twenty-four years old and working as a telephone engineer in Imperial Valley, on the California-Baja California border. In his introduction to the 1984 reprint of the novel, published under the author's preferred original title ( The Lizard Woman), Waters recalled the circumstances of writing: He was most widely revered for The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942) and The Book of the Hopi (1963), which became a key text for members of the American counterculture. A native of Colorado, Waters identified strongly wih his Native American ancestry (his father was part Cheyenne), and wrote extensively on Indian topics. Very good in silver-stamped orange and blue cloth, in a very good example of the rare dust-jacket.įirst edition of the author's first book.

Fever pitch novel