Just as the 1960s was a transitional decade of far-reaching significance in American culture, the 1960s was also a time of major changes in the history of sports fiction. Several of the sports novels of the sixties reflected changes in and were perhaps motivated by socid change in America. During this decade, the dominance of baseball in fiction was broken. Updike'sRabbit, Run(1960), for example, initiated a minor interlude of basketball fiction. More importantly, the year 1968 marked a major turning point in sports fiction through novels by Frederick Exley, Robert Coover, and Gary Cartwright. After 1968, writers turned primarily to football in their novels, but baseball stories enjoyed some popularity as a result of the seventies' interest in nostalgia.