• Preface; Prologue: 'The game and the nation'; Part I. Sportsmen and Gamesmen in the Nineteenth Century: 1. Play, sport and western mythmaking; 2. Play, sport and southern honour; 3. Gender and the game; Part II. Raising the Stakes: 4. Playing the game of life; 5. 'The game' in business fiction; 6. Desperate players and the sport of the gods; Part III. Twentieth-Century Legacies: 7. Sportsmen and gamesmen in twentieth-century fiction; 8. In the wake of Moby-Dick; 9. The 'great games' of politics and business; Part IV. Holy Play and the Counterculture: 10. Transcendental play and the theology of sentimentalism; 11. Play and the counterculture in the 1920s; 12. From beats and hippies to the new age; Epilogue; Notes; Index.

"This is a massive work, its sweep is majestic. It attempts nothing less than a reading of the past two centuries of American life through the metaphor of life as a game." Norman K. Denzin, American Journal of Sociology