You could construct a history of modern literature just by writing about boxing. Start with the Marquess of Queensberry, who both helped codify the rules of the sport and, by leaving a calling card addressed “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]” in 1895, started the chain of events that led to Wilde’s conviction on charges of gross indecency. Then you could write about the first time Ernest Hemingway met Wyndham Lewis. The encounter took place in Hemingway’s Paris studio, where one burly modernist, Hemingway, was teaching another, scrappier modernist, Ezra Pound, how to box. (“Ezra had not been boxing very long,” Hemingway remembered, “and I tried to make him look as good as possible.”) To talk about midcentury fiction, you could focus on Norman Mailer, who wrote a book on the 1974 bout between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Then you could move on to Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote in her 1987 classic On Boxing that “the boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind’s collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness.”
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