The Chicago Cubs, founded in 1869, are a charter member of the National League and the only one of the eight original league clubs still playing in the city in which the franchise started. At various times in the 19th century the players were called White Stockings, Colts and Orphans. They were first referred to as the Cubs in the March 27, 1902, issue of the Chicago Daily News. Using newspaper articles, books and archival records, the author chronicles the team's early planning stages from 1868 to 1902. Reprinted selections from firsthand accounts provide a colorful narrative of baseball in America as well as a documentary history of the Chicago team and its members before they were the Cubs.

In the course of his career Willie Morris (1934-1999) attained national prominence as a journalist, editor, nonfiction writer, novelist, memoirist, and news commentator. As this eloquent book reveals, he was also a master essayist whose gift was in crafting short compositions. Shifting Interludes, an anthology that spans his career of forty years, includes pieces he wrote for the Daily Texan, Texas Observer, the Washington Star, Vanity Fair, Southern Living, and other publications. These diverse works reflect the scope of Morris's wide-ranging interests. The collection comprises biographical profiles, newspaper editorials and columns, political analyses, travel narratives, sports commentaries, book reviews, and his thoughts--both critical and affectionate-about his beloved home state of Mississippi. Two essays are previously unpublished--""A Long-ago Rendezvous with Alger Hiss"" and ""The Day I Followed the Mayor around Town."" One essay, ""Mississippi Rebel on a Texas Campus,"" is the first article he wrote for a national publication. Morris's subjects reflect his autobiography, his poignant feelings, and his courtly manners. He expresses his outrage as he decries Southern racism in ""Despair in Mississippi,"" his melancholy as he recounts a visit to his hometown Yazoo City in ""The Rain Fell Noiselessly,"" his grace as he salutes a college football team and its fallen comrade in ""In the Spirit of the Game,"" his humor as he admits to a bout of middle-age infatuation in ""Mitch and the Infield Fly Rule,"" and his pensiveness as he remembers his much-loved grandmother Mamie in ""Weep No More, My Lady."" Willie Morris is one of Mississippi's most acclaimed writers and a former editor of Harper's. University Press of Mississippi reissued two of his works, North Toward Home and The Courting of Marcus Dupree, and most recently published My Mississippi, on which he collaborated with his son, the photographer David Rae Morris. Jack Bales, the reference and humanities librarian at Mary Washington College and a friend of Morris's, compiled and edited Conversations with Willie Morris (also published by the University Press of Mississippi).

During the three decades since the "London Sunday Times" trumpeted "North Toward Home" as "the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain," southerner Willie Morris (1934-1999) wrote seventeen other books, including a second well-received volume of autobiography. Throughout his lengthy literary career, which began when he contributed his first sports column to a local newspaper at the age of twelve, he attained national prominence as a journalist, nonfiction writer, novelist, editor, and essayist.

"Conversations with Willie Morris," the first collection of interviews and profiles devoted to this American author, Jack Bales compiles twenty-five fascinating and incisive conversations (some never before published) with a man who for over forty years confronted the turbulent issues of his generation. "I have no alternative to words," Morris occasionally replied when asked about his far-reaching career. And throughout his life he unceasingly spoke out on matters that concerned him, writing at various times with outrage, humor, sadness, and affection -- but always with passion and candor.

The diverse topics covered in this collection reflect the scope of Morris's wide-ranging interests. As he speaks with journalists, public radio and television hosts, social historians, and even a professional comedian, he candidly discusses his own life and literary career, sports, other authors, the 1960s, politics, the Civil War, dogs, the complexities of race relations, and, of course, the South and his beloved Mississippi.

After reviewing the author's Homecomings some ten years ago, a "Boston Globe" writer concluded, "There's damn fine life left in this man's prose." As is evident by Willie Morris's eighteen books, countless essays, and the insightful profiles and interviews gathered here, there is little doubt that this man's prose will be remembered as fresh, lively, and thought-provoking.