It gets really lonely it gets very nerve-racking. “I just said, It’s so labor intensive it’s so isolating.

“You write other books, and some do well, and some don’t do as well as you would hope,” Bissinger says.

However, his early success remained difficult to recapture. Since then he’s written about baseball ( Three Nights in August), basketball ( Lebron’s Dream Team, cowritten with Lebron James), and his relationship with his special-needs son, Zach, who has savant syndrome ( Father’s Day). You’re looking for that great sentence, and frankly sometimes you have no excuses.”Īfter Friday Night Lights, it was seven years before Bissinger published his second book, A Prayer for the City, about politics in Philadelphia. “Your eyes get tired, the words don’t come as easily. “Everyone thinks that writing is sort of permanent in your life, but that’s not true,” he says. Harper is comparing The Mosquito Bowl to narrative nonfiction classics such as Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat, but there was a time when Bissinger had almost given up on writing books entirely. This fall, Harper will publish The Mosquito Bowl, Bissinger’s painstakingly researched, vivid, and at times heartbreaking work of narrative nonfiction about two WWII regiments of Marines-both of which boasted an exceptional concentration of world-class football talent-and the mosquito-ridden scrimmage they played against each other in Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve of 1944. Perhaps that pressure is why it’s taken Bissinger over 30 years to return at book length to the subject that made him famous: football. And I said to myself, I can’t possibly top this book, which created a lot of pressure.” “People are ambitious people want to top what they’ve done in the past. “I do think that had an impact on me,” Bissinger, 67, says, speaking by phone from his adopted hometown of Philadelphia. But for Bissinger himself, the success of Friday Night Lights has been almost impossible to replicate. Published in 1990, it inspired a movie and two television shows, sold millions of copies, and all but created a certain genre of sports book.įriday Night Lights is both an American classic and a touchstone for young journalists eager to take a big swing on an unlikely story. A year later he moved his family to Odessa, Tex., with the idea that he would write a book about high school football.

In 1987, at the age of 32, he won a Pulitzer Prize while at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Like the star high school athlete whose abilities appear effortless to an outsider, Buzz Bissinger had a charmed early career as a writer.

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