A collection of all the best fiction and poetry about runners and running.
An inspiring book, brimming with courage, exaltation,
fear, pain, sweat, hope, and elation.

"Animates the spirit of running better than any other book."
—Runner's World

"Battista has gathered all the memorable (and widely scattered) jewels of running literature and melded them into a single glorious volume. I enjoyed it immensely and will keep it close at hand for many years."
—John L. Parker, author of Once a Runner

Literature and sports are not mutually exclusive, though at times one may despair of finding their common ground. A flood of disposable writing on sports is published each year. But at the sublime high end, baseball has Roger Angell and Roger Kahn; basketball and tennis each received a visit from John McPhee; football has Peter Gent and Fred Exley; golf has P.G. Wodehouse and John Updike, by God.

Running’s well-known literary pantheon is composed mostly of nonfiction writers. George Sheehan was the master essayist and philosopher. Other standouts whose work transcends journalism include Kenny Moore, Amby Burfoot, and Joe Henderson. But fiction and poetry about running are relatively rare. Some will know Sillitoe; the cognoscenti have read John L. Parker. Beyond that, the familiar names or stories usually dwindle. The only mildly familiar running poem is A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” As a group, we runners are strangely under-represented in literature. There are eight million serious runners in the U.S. alone (surely some of them are fiction writers), but a wildly disproportionate number of runners in novels and stories and poems. This anthology is an attempt to find and honor our bards; to bring the best of them together—both the writers of great renown who in the course of their distinguished careers have touched upon running (Walt Whitman, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Carol Oates, W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Toni Cade Bambara), and the lesser known writers whose works (some hereby recovered from the dustbin of history) will also bring gladness, insight, or inspiration to any runner.

This book does not pretend, by any means, to establish a runner’s literary canon. It omits as many great works as it includes, and for reasons of space and focus it includes only fiction and poetry, leaving out the best nonfiction writing on running (which could easily fill another volume). The main purpose of The Runner’s Literary Companion is to provide runners with a source of aesthetic pleasure: seeing themselves reflected in these characters, and seeing the ephemeral truths and beauties of running distilled to lasting purity. It also provides the pleasure of concentrated wealth: if it is a rare joy to come across one running story, finding twenty-four in one place must be that much better. This book should be a solace on rainy days (after your run) or during travel, late nights, or illness. It should be inspiration for even more and better running, and for thinking and talking about running.

Coupling good writing with good running is an extraordinarily difficult task, as the sport is innately interior, and impossibly complex. Elvis Costello once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” In the same way, running—the total, exalted, painful, glorious, miserable, purifying, filthy, rhythmic, dreamy, transcendent, achy experience—for the most part defies rendition in words. In that light, what is gathered here seems miraculous by its very existence; and it is a wonder to see the various ways running has been fictionalized. Some of these stories and poems are brilliantly written, literary gems in the truest sense. Some of them contain uncannily perceptive descriptions of the act of running, or a great character who happens to run. Good writing and good running are present to varying degrees in every story here.