A Study Guide for Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ernest Lawrence Thayer's "Casey at the Bat," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535820486

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Casey at the Bat

Ernest Lawrence Thayer

1888

Introduction

There are certain works of art that have gained the status as true pieces of Americana, such as Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn, Thomas Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, Tennessee William’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, and Ernest Thayer’s ballad Casey at the Bat. Thayer was a newspaperman for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Daily Examiner during the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. He was assigned to write editorials and ballads for the newspaper, and Casey at the Bat was published in the Examiner on June 3, 1888, under his pseudonym Phin. Although Thayer wrote many other ballads besides Casey at the Bat, they all passed into obscurity. Casey at the Bat gained its fame through a novelist, Archibald Gunter, who gave a newspaper clipping of the ballad to an actor friend named DeWolf Hopper. Hopper recited the ballad in August of 1888, in between acts of a play he was performing in New York, and the audience gave him a riotous standing ovation. Thus, DeWolf Hopper launched his own career and immortalized Casey at the Bat. Hopper later wrote that he had recited baseball’s most famous poem more than ten thousand times during the following forty-seven