Fever Pitch Study Guide

Nick Hornby was born in Redhill, Surrey and raised in Maidenhead, England, near London. Hornby’s father, Sir Derek Hornby, was a prominent business executive. He was the chairman of a large railway development company owned by the UK government, and he was knighted in 1990. Hornby’s parents separated when he was 11. He went on to study English at Cambridge University and was a high school English teacher for a few years before he started to publish his writing. Hornby’s first published work was a collection of essays called Contemporary American Fiction. After Fever Pitch, Hornby went on to write several novels and films. He also writes music reviews and lyrics. Hornby has been married twice and has three kids. His first son has autism, which inspired Hornby to create a charity and special education school, Treehouse Trust. He also cofounded a London-based organization called Ministry of Stories, which promotes young adult literacy. Hornby is a fan of Arsenal Football Club.

Nick Hornby is credited as the father of “lad lit,” which became a popular genre of writing in the 2010s in the UK. Lad lit came out of lad culture, which was a subculture in the UK during the same era. Lad culture was a response to feminism driven mostly by young, straight, middle class, white men who rejected intellectual pursuits in favor of stereotypical male interests like drinking, sports, and misogyny. Lad lit is generally seen as literature written by and for men who identified with this culture. Though Fever Pitch, as well as several of Hornby’s novels, fall into this category, Hornby has publicly criticized lad culture in favor of a feminist view. And in Fever Pitch, he actively critiques the culture of toxic masculinity and violence that developed alongside football fandom. The term “lad lit” inspired what has become a much more prevalent term, “chick lit.”

Published just two years prior to Fever Pitch, Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs details the emergence of the violence that surrounds English football culture in the 1970s and 1980s, a subject Hornby addresses in Fever Pitch. The Damned Utd by David Peace is another biography that also focuses on English football culture in this same era. Peace’s book chronicles Brian Clough’s brief role as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Though fictional, Nick Hornby’s first novel, High Fidelity, shares similar themes with Fever Pitch, notably obsession, loneliness, and navigating adult relationships. High Fidelity has been adapted into a film, a Broadway musical, and a television series.