The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood »

Jane Leavy is an award-winning former sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post and author of the critically acclaimed comic novel Squeeze Play. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Jane Leavy, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, returns with a biography of an American original—number 7, Mickey Mantle. Drawing on more than five hundred interviews with friends and family, teammates, and opponents, she delivers the definitive account of Mantle's life, mining the mythology of The Mick for the true story of a luminous and illustrious talent with an achingly damaged soul.

Meticulously reported and elegantly written, The Last Boy is a baseball tapestry that weaves together episodes from the author's weekend with The Mick in Atlantic City, where she interviewed her hero in 1983, after he was banned from baseball, with reminiscences from friends and family of the boy from Commerce, Oklahoma, who would lead the Yankees to seven world championships, be voted the American League's Most Valuable Player three times, win the Triple Crown in 1956, and duel teammate Roger Maris for Babe Ruth's home run crown in the summer of 1961—the same boy who would never grow up.

As she did so memorably in her biography of Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy transcends the hyperbole of hero worship to reveal the man behind the coast-to-coast smile, who grappled with a wrenching childhood, crippling injuries, and a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. In The Last Boy she chronicles her search to find out more about the person he was and, given what she discovers, to explain his mystifying hold on a generation of baseball fans, who were seduced by that lopsided, gap-toothed grin. It is an uncommon biography, with literary overtones: not only a portrait of an icon, but an investigation of memory itself. How long was the Tape Measure Home Run? Did Mantle swing the same way right-handed and left-handed? What really happened to his knee in the 1951 World Series? What happened to the red-haired, freckle-faced boy known back home as Mickey Charles?

"I believe in memory, not memorabilia," Leavy writes in her preface. But in The Last Boy, she discovers that what we remember of our heroes—and even what they remember of themselves—is only where the story begins.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The schizophrenic quality of Mickey Mantle's life is made powerfully manifest throughout Jane Leavy's exhaustively researched, delightfully readable biography. Right from the start, Mantle's enormous athletic potential was bundled with his debilitating psychological and physical problems. Leavy not only wrestles with the maddening contradictions of the man himself but also the carefully-constructed myth of Mantle: that the Yankee slugger, by pure willpower, transcended humble beginnings and a lifetime of physical pain to become an American icon. But she keeps her eye on more than the facts of her subject's life, recognizing that fans and writers (herself included) have "invent[ed] a kinder, warmer, bigger Mick, the Mick

Preface: My Weekend with The Mick

PART ONE Innocence Lost, Atlantic City, April 1983

1 March 26, 1951: The Whole World Opened Up 7

2 October 5, 1951: When Fates Converge 20

3 October 23, 1951: Undermined 38

4 May 27, 1949: Patrimony 49

5 May 20, 1952: In the Ground 71

6 April 17, 1953: One Big Day 83

7 November 2, 1953: Fish Bait 103

8 September 26, 1954: No Other Time 122

PART TWO A Round with The Mick, Atlantic City, April 1983

9 May 30, 1956: A Body Remembers 149

10 May 16, 1957: Returns of the Day 163

11 August 14, 1960: Season Under Siege 186

PART THREE Nightcap, Atlantic City, April 1983

12 September 25, 1961: Dr. Feelgood 210

13 May 18, 1962: His Best Self 233

14 June 5, 1963: The Breaking Point 248

15 September 26, 1968: Last Licks 264

PART FOUR Dream On, Atlantic City, April 1983

16 June 8, 1969: Half-life of a Star 290

17 December 19, 1985: 18 Below in Fargo 306

18 February 5, 1988: Top of the Heap 327

19 Febraury 4, 1994: Getaway Day 339

PART FIVE Riding with The Mick, Atlantic City, April 1983

20 August 13, 1995: The Last Boy 362

Epilogue 385

Acknowledgments 389

Appendix 1 Interview List 395

Appendix 2 The Kinetic Mick 405

Appendix 3 Who's Better? 417

Bibliography 421

Index 439