THEBIG FELLA

NOW IN PAPERBACK!

From Jane Leavy, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth—the man Roger Angell dubbed “the model for modern celebrity.”

Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man.

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Indiebound
LEARN MORE

Jane Leavy

BestSelling Author & JOURNALIST

Jane Leavy is an award-winning former sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post, known for diving into a subject and emerging with work that is both meticulously researched and narratively rich. She is the author of the national bestsellers The Last Boy, Sandy Koufax and the comic novel Squeeze Play, called “the best novel ever written about baseball” by Entertainment Weekly. She lives in Washington, D.C. and Truro, Massachusetts.
MORE

Other Books

The Last Boy Book Cover

The Last Boy

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Time Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year

Read More
Sandy Koufax Book Cover

Sandy Koufax

A New York Times bestseller

Read More
Squeeze Play Book Cover

Squeeze Play

“Will have you singing a rousing chorus of ‘Take Me Out to the Locker Room.’” - People

Read More
{
This is one of the best sports biographies I have ever read. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, it reveals with stunning insight both the talents and the demons that drove Mickey Mantle, bringing him to life as never before.

– Doris Kearns Goodwin

on The Last Boy

{
Leavy has hit it out of the park…A lot more than a biography. It’s a consideration of how we create our heroes, and how this hero’s self perception distinguishes him from nearly every other great athlete in living memory… a remarkably rich portrait.

– Time

on Sandy Koufax

{

Leavy’s hilarious debut is a strong early candidate for MVP of the sports novel season…As raunchy as stories by Dan Jenkins and Peter Gent, as authentic as exposes by Jim Bouton and Jim Brosnan, this tale will delight.

– Publishers Weekly

on Squeeze Play

News & Events

Why on Earth Did Boston Sell Babe Ruth to the Yankees?

Jan 16, 2020

Read Jane's op-ed in the New York Times on the sale, at the end of 1919, that changed baseball — and New York City — forever: One hundred years ago on Christmas Day, typically the slowest news day of the year, George Herman Ruth Jr. knew there would be a news hole...

read more

The Big Fella Now in Paperback!

Sep 26, 2019

And will be featured in the October 6, 2019 paperback row highlights from The New York Times: This detail-packed biography of the baseball legend recounts his eventful life and tracks the machinations behind his rise to an unprecedented kind of celebrity in the...

read more