A 1972 thesis “Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in Physical Education” is now available online.

Click here to access Kathryn Jane Upshaw’s “John Updike and Norman Mailer: Sport Inferences,” which was filed in September 1972. To navigate past the title page, click on the right center edge to move forward, and the left center edge to go backward. “Through the analysis of the lives and writings of modern contemporary American authors John Updike and Norman Mailer, the allusions to sport were studied with a view toward understanding the inferences of that phenomenon on the development of the novel’s elements of plot, character, and setting. Furthermore, sport inferences were studied in light of style.”

The author studied Updike’s The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm, Couples, and Rabbit Redux, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, An American Dream, and Why Are We in Vietnam?