Bang the Drum Slowly

Bang the Drum Slowly is a novel by Mark Harris, first published in 1956 by Knopf. The novel is the second in a series of four novels written by Harris that chronicles the career of baseball player Henry W. Wiggen. Bang the Drum Slowly was a sequel to The Southpaw (1953), with A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957) and It Looked Like For Ever (1979), completing the tetralogy of baseball novels by Harris. The novel was made into a 1956 United States Steel Hour television adaptation starring Paul Newman and a later film adaptation in 1973, with Harris writing the screenplay. Bang the Drum Slowly was named one of the top 100 sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated and is the most popular of the four books published in this series, according to the Los Angeles Times. 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. Background Harris played baseball as a boy and often wrote about the game and was known for writing realistically about the sport in his novels. For this novel, Harris chose to write it in the vernacular of pitcher Henry Wiggen, who narrates the story in an inimitable fashion. Harris called it "ungrammar" and said that the book was written "out of a rebellion against formal language." The title of the novel was inspired by lines from the song "Streets of Laredo", which is about a dying cowboy. It is sung by one of the ballplayers, Piney Woods, a back-up catcher, at a team gathering. The version of the song that he sings contains the lyrics, "Oh bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, and play the dead march as you carry me along..."