The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball

Growing up in a doomed hometown with a missing father and a single mother, Nicholas Dawidoff listened to baseball every night on his bedside radio, the professional ballplayers gradually becoming the men in his life. A portrait of a childhood shaped by a stoical, enterprising mother, a disturbed, dangerous father, the private world of baseball, and the awkwardness of first love, The Crowd Sounds Happy is the moving tale of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in troubled times.

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of three previous books. The Fly Swatter was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and In the Country of Country was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveler. He is also the editor of the Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology. A Guggenheim, Civitella Ranieri and Berlin Prize Fellow, he is currently the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.