Midwest Academic Fiction

[Roy Gordon]

_Wake Up, Stupid!_, by Mark Harris.

It's an epistolary novel, which got Harris one of his footnotes in
Booth's _The Rhetoric of Fiction_.

The protagonist is an English professor/prize fighter(!), hated by the
department (as I remember) but a student favorite though he's hardly
gentle with them, yelling "Wake up, stupid!" at any who doze off in his
lecture classes.

He has a literary agent.  The lower case 'f' on the agent's typewriter
(remember those?) doesn't work, so we see sentences like this is the agent's
letters (I just made this one up.  The ones in the book are, let us say,
better):

	He got o   o  the  reeway at the  irst exit.

Later, he begins using the upper case 'F':

	He got oFF oF the Freeway at the First exit.

Harris, for those who don't know him, is better known as the author of
the Henry Wiggen baseball books, one of which, _Bang the Drum Slowly_,
was made into a successful movie which helped make Robert De Niro's
reputation.  It had previously been dramatized (live?) in the early days of
TV on Playhouse 90 or somesuch, starring a young Paul Newman as the pitcher.

The first novel in that series, _The Southpaw_, also received mention
in _The Rhetoric of Fiction_ as showing an instance of the difference
between the authorial point of view and that of the narrator.  The
narrator (the pitcher) complains about Ring Lardner baseball stories not
concentrating on who won and who got the hits, but on the second stringers
just talking about boring things while warming the bench.

					-- roy