Ruth embodied a new and yet very old phenomenon—celebrity—in a technological era poised to capitalize on him.

Jonathan Goldman
Jonathan Goldman is an associate professor in the department of English at the New York Institute of Technology. He is the author of Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (University of Texas Press, 2011) and editor of Joyce and the Law (University Press of Florida, 2017). His work about Babe Ruth comes out of his website project “NY 1920: 100 Years Ago Today (When We Became Modern).” He has published widely on 20th-century literature and culture; he also plays trumpet and composes and arranges music, leading the Latin music group Spanglish Fly.