Description

From one of the major innovators of New Journalism, Norman Mailer’s The Fight is the real-life story of a clash between two of the world’s greatest boxers, both in and out of the ring, published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Norman Mailer’s The Fight focuses on the 1974 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire. Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in the ring. Foreman’s genius employed silence, serenity and cunning. He had never been defeated. His hands were his instrument, and ‘he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case’. Together the two men made boxing history in an explosive meeting of two great minds, two iron wills and monumental egos.

‘”If ever a fighter had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth-century art, it must be Ali”, says Norm, and his achievement in this masterly book is of a similar order, demonstrating that writing about sport can also be a twentieth-century art’
Geoff Dyer, New Statesman

‘Probably no one has written about boxing better than Mailer has’
Guardian

Publisher Review

"Entertaining... Mailer continues his familiar shadow-boxing with the ineffable." -- Time In 1975 in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the virtual center of Africa, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other until one was declared winner. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible "professor of boxing" who vowed to reclaim the championship he had lost. The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble and who kept his hands in his pockets "the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case." Observing them was Norman Mailer, whose grasp of the titanic battle's feints and stratagems -- and whose sensitivity to their deeper symbolism -- make this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport. Whether he is analyzing the fighters' moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer is a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity -- and su