King Football

In this landmark work exploring the vibrant world of football from the 1920s through the 1950s, Michael Oriard explores how the mass media shaped and were shaped by the exploding popularity of football. King Football is at once a sweeping cultural history of football, a provocative study of the power of print and broadcast media, and a compelling investigation of American attitudes about race, class, and gender and their relationship to sport.

A former football player for Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs, Michael Oriard is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at Oregon State University. He is author of four previous books on American sport and sports literature, including Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, which focuses on the sport from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.