Henry Wiggen was a fictional

baseball player Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding te ...

who was the subject of four novels by Mark Harris: ''

The Southpaw Mark Harris (November 19, 1922 – May 30, 2007) was an American novelist, literary biographer, and educator. Biography Early life Harris was born Mark Harris Finkelstein in Mount Vernon, New York, to Carlyle and Ruth (Klausner) Finkelstein. ...

'' (1953), ''

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'' ...

'' (1956), ''A Ticket for a Seamstitch'' (1957), and ''It Looked Like For Ever'' (1979). Wiggen, who was born on July 4, 1931 in

Perkinsville, New York Perkinsville is a locale in Steuben County in the U.S. state of New York. It is the birthplace of Patty Maloney. It is located at . As of the 2000 U.S. census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating i ...

, joined the fictitious "New York Mammoths" in 1952Henry Wiggen is still bringing the heat
by

Ivan Maisel Ivan Maisel is a national college football writer. Career An alumnus of Murphy High in Mobile and Stanford University, Maisel began his career at The Atlanta Constitution in 1981, where he covered Clemson's unlikely run to the national cham ...

, at

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). Th ...

; published July 11, 2007; retrieved July 24, 2014 as a

pitcher In baseball, the pitcher is the player who throws ("pitches") the baseball from the pitcher's mound toward the catcher to begin each play, with the goal of retiring a batter, who attempts to either make contact with the pitched ball or draw ...

. His teammates nicknamed him "Author", because he was always writing.

Critical reception

The '' Columbia Daily Spectator'' has described Wiggen as having a "complex character", saying that he "epitomizes the American spirit of 'never say die,'" while

Gerald Peary Gerald Peary (born October 30, 1944) is an American film critic, filmmaker, editor of the University Press of Mississippi, and a former curator of the Harvard Film Archive. Early life and education Peary graduated from Rider University in 1964, w ...

says that of all the fictional baseball players in American literature, Wiggen is the only one who "matters beyond the page" and "hangs on in the reader's thoughts, season after season;"Diamonds In The Rough – Mark Harris (An Interview with the writer of ''Bang the Drum Slowly'')
originally published in ''

The Real Paper ''The Real Paper'' was a Boston-area alternative weekly newspaper with a circulation in the tens of thousands. It ran from August 2, 1972, to June 18, 1981, often devoting space to counterculture and alternative politics of the early 1970s. The o ...

'' (Boston), October 27, 1979 (p. 5, 8 ,9); archived at GeraldPeary.com; retrieved July 25, 2014 he also notes Wiggen's propensity for

malapropism A malapropism (also called a malaprop, acyrologia, or Dogberryism) is the mistaken use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance. An example is the statement attributed to ...

s and poor grammar, comparing him to "

Dizzy Dean Jay Hanna "Dizzy" Dean (January 16, 1910 – July 17, 1974), also known as Jerome Herman Dean (both the 1910 and 1920 Censuses show his name as "Jay"), was an American professional baseball pitcher. During his Major League Baseball (MLB) career ...

with a typewriter".

Media portrayals

Henry Wiggen has been portrayed on television by Paul Newman (in the 1956 ''

United States Steel Hour ''The United States Steel Hour'' is an anthology series which brought hour long dramas to television from 1953 to 1963. The television series and the radio program that preceded it were both sponsored by the United States Steel Corporation (U. S. ...

'' adaptation of ''Bang the Drum Slowly''),Scene From 'Bang The Drum Slowly' (Caption:American actors (left to right) Paul Newman as Henry Wiggen, Albert Salmi (1928 - 1990) as Bruce Pierson, and Georgann Johnson as Holly, appear in a scene from the United States Steel Hour production of 'Bang the Drum Slowly' which aired September 26, 1956)
at Getty Images; retrieved July 25, 2014 and on film by

Michael Moriarty Michael Moriarty (born April 5, 1941) is an American-Canadian actor and jazz musician. He received an Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award for his first acting role on American television as a Nazi SS officer in the 1978 mini-series ''Holocaust'' ...

(in the 1973 film adaptation of the same novel).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wiggen, Henry Fictional baseball players