-There's No Base Like Home

H.C. Witwer was a successful short story author best known for his baseball and boxing stories. In addition to short stories, Witwer wrote intertitles for many silent films. The example on display here, There’s No Base Like Home (1920) was written in the American vernacular of the time. Ed Harmon, a WWI veteran married to a French girl he met while in the service, is a major league pitcher. Witwer writes the novel as one side of the correspondence between Harmon and a friend named Joe. In his side of the exchange, Harmon writes about his baseball career and his family life. The novel is critical of anti-Semitism while being firmly racist and sexist. This title would be research interest to scholars studying race and gender in American sports.