ABSTRACT
As tennis reporter Jay Jennings concludes, ‘Tennis may not have the extensive contemporary bibliography of baseball as a subject of fiction and poetry, but its literary history is much longer and … more prestigious’ (1995, p.xv). Historically, references to tennis appear in the works of diarists like Samuel Pepys, playwrights such as William Shakespeare, dramatists including John Webster and Henry Porter, poets and poet dramatists like Ben Johnson and Geoffrey Chaucer and a philologist such as F.J. Furnivall. Among the modern literati whose work has featured tennis may be included John Betjeman, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Pinsky, Irwin Shaw, John Updike and David Foster Wallace. Tennis also appears in contemporary mysteries by Harlan Cohen and Jeremy Potter and in plays such as Neil Simon’s California Suite and The Royal Tenenbaums by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson.
