On Boxing

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Literature & Fiction

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates explores the sport of boxing, which she has followed since childhood when her father took her to fights. In this extended essay, Oates examines boxing's brutality and beauty, its history and rituals and the lives of fighters such as Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. She considers why people box and why audiences watch, and what the sport reveals about pain, masculinity and violence. First published in 1987, this edition adds later essays.

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