Bang The Drum Slowly was written in 1956 and is the second in a series of 4 works by Mark Harris that feature Henry Wiggen, a star left-handed pitcher on the New York Mammoths baseball. . I first read it in 1959, when I was 13, and have reread it several times since. Maybe it's not really "a book about baseball." The foreword is a quote from "The Huge Season" by Wright Morris: "….. 'a book can have Chicago in it and not be about Chicago'….[He pointed to another book with Hemmingway's name on the back], “There is a boxer in it but it is not a boxer”; “Is this the sun rising?” I asked, “Geez, if I know what that is,” he said. “But it’s a book about baseball players. The story evolves through their lives and the events of a baseball season. So it's an atmosphere that baseball fans can relate to. Bruce Pearson is a young third-string receiver with the Mammoths. He's a simple country boy from a small town in Georgia who is completely out of place in a big city like New York. He has no friends on the team and his teammates only pay attention to him when they make fun of him. He has an abundance of raw talent, but he doesn't contribute anything. Bruce is the focus of the book because he is dying; well, we're all dying, but he's going to die soon. It is the middle of winter and Henry Wiggen receives an early morning phone call from Pearson. Of course he's surprised because he and Pearson aren't close. No one on the team is close to Bruce. Pearson wants Henry to come to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to pick him up and drive him home to Georgia. Bruce has just been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease (which in 1956 was not curable). Henry's wife, Holly, is pregnant with their first child and he has no interest in Rochester, Minnesota in the winter, but he is going. That's the kind of person Henry is. He's not a nice benefactor. He is a tough competitor, pragmatic and individualistic, but he is a loyal person who knows right from wrong and understands that sometimes people need to step outside of their own box and do something for others. His wife understands it too. So he flies to Minnesota, picks up Pearson and drives him home to his family..