A short life of the author
Chad Harbach (b. 24 November 1975) is an American novelist and editor whose debut, The Art of Fielding (2011), was one of the most celebrated and commercially successful literary novels of the 2010s — a book that managed the rare feat of being simultaneously a serious literary novel about failure, ambition, and love, and a genuinely absorbing baseball story. He is also a co-founder and editor of n+1, one of the most important American literary and intellectual magazines of the twenty-first century, and the editor of MFA vs NYC (2014), a collection of essays that crystallised a generation’s debate about how American literature is produced and supported.
Life and Career
Harbach was born in Racine, Wisconsin, and grew up in the rural Midwest — a background that informs the Lake Michigan setting of his novel. He attended Harvard University and the University of Virginia’s MFA programme. After Virginia, he moved to New York and became involved with the founding of n+1, a literary magazine launched in 2004 by Harbach, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Marco Roth, and Benjamin Kunkel. n+1 positioned itself as a successor to Partisan Review and the New York intellectuals — a journal that combined literary criticism, cultural commentary, and political argument with an ambition and seriousness that the more established literary magazines had largely abandoned.
The Art of Fielding took nearly a decade to write. Harbach worked on the novel through his twenties and into his thirties, revising obsessively — a gestation that the novel itself, with its themes of perfectionism and the paralysis that perfectionism produces, seems to document. The manuscript was sold at auction in a bidding war that attracted six-figure offers from multiple publishers, and the story of the sale — a literary-magazine editor’s debut going for a fortune — became part of the publishing narrative of the moment.
The novel is set at Westish College, a small liberal arts school on the shore of Lake Michigan (inspired partly by the real college towns of Wisconsin), and follows five interconnected characters. Henry Skrimshander is a gifted shortstop from Lankton, South Dakota, whose defensive play is so fluid it seems to achieve the kind of perfection that his favourite book — a fictional baseball manual called The Art of Fielding by Aparicio Rodriguez — describes. Mike Schwartz is the team captain who discovers Henry and mentors him with a ferocity that nearly destroys them both. Owen Dunne is Henry’s roommate, a gay, biracial intellectual who becomes romantically involved with Guert Affenlight, the college’s sixty-year-old president — a Melville scholar who has never before been attracted to a man. Pella Affenlight is Guert’s daughter, fleeing a failed marriage and trying to remake herself at her father’s school.
The novel’s central crisis is Henry’s development of “the yips” — the sudden, inexplicable inability to make routine throws that has afflicted athletes from Steve Blass to Chuck Knoblauch. After accidentally hitting Owen with an errant throw, Henry’s arm simply stops working. The yips function in the novel as a metaphor for the paralysis that perfectionism produces: Henry’s fielding was so good that it became unconscious, and the moment he becomes conscious of it — the moment he thinks about throwing instead of simply throwing — the ability vanishes.
The Melville connection is deliberate and structural. Westish College has a campus statue of Herman Melville (who, in the novel’s fiction, once visited the site), and the novel’s themes — obsessive pursuit, the relationship between captain and crew, the cost of ambition — echo Moby-Dick. Schwartz is an Ahab figure, driving Henry toward perfection with a single-mindedness that masks his own physical and emotional deterioration. The Affenlight-Owen relationship echoes the Ishmael-Queequeg intimacy.
The novel spent months on bestseller lists, was translated into more than twenty languages, and was praised by critics as diverse as Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. It was compared to the work of John Irving (the campus novel as bildungsroman), Philip Roth (the baseball novel as American mythology), and Jeffrey Eugenides (the ensemble novel of intersecting lives).
Harbach edited MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (2014), a collection of essays — by Elif Batuman, George Saunders, Maria Adelmann, and others — about the two dominant systems for supporting American literary culture: the university creative writing programme and the New York publishing industry. The collection’s central argument is that these two systems produce different kinds of writers and different kinds of fiction, and that neither has acknowledged the other’s influence honestly.
Themes and Style
Harbach writes about perfectionism, mentorship, and the cost of ambition — the way the pursuit of excellence in one domain (athletics, scholarship, love) can atrophy a person’s capacity in every other domain. His prose is warm, generous, and precisely observed — he writes about baseball with the technical knowledge of a former player and about academic life with the affection and exasperation of someone who has lived in both worlds. The novel’s tone is unusual for contemporary literary fiction: it is genuinely tender toward its characters without being sentimental, and it takes sports seriously as a site of moral and psychological inquiry.
Critical Standing
The Art of Fielding is one of the most successful literary debuts of the 2010s and is widely regarded as the best baseball novel since Bernard Malamud’s The Natural or Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association. Harbach has not yet published a second novel — a silence that, given the first novel’s themes of perfectionism, has become part of his literary narrative.
Key Works
- The Art of Fielding (2011)
- MFA vs NYC (editor, 2014)
Collecting Harbach
The Art of Fielding (2011, Little, Brown) — first edition brings $15–$40. Advance reading copies bring $30–$80. Signed copies from the extensive book tour are available.