American Kings

“A must-buy for not only every serious football fan but also every actual quarterback, from high school to the Hall of Fame.”
—New York Times / The Athletic

“[The title] sounds grandiose until you realize just how much pressure rides on the shoulders of a quarterback, on and off the field…. To a certain degree, “American Kings” is not so different from any parable about the perils of ambition.”
—The New Yorker

“Catnip for sports fans.”
—Garden & Gun

“[Wickersham’s] ability to scan the field and make smart, crisp connections earns him standing with Plimpton and Halberstam among the finest sports chroniclers.”
— Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Ali: A Life

“Seth Wickersham’s new work is subtitled A Biography of the Quarterback, and, yessir, it’s not about a single quarterback, it’s about all of them. It’s about anybody who has ever played, aspired to play, or been obsessed with the quarterback position. […] read it, folks. I urge you. It’s not just about football. It’s about a kingdom of its own.”
— Rick Telander, National Sports Media Association Hall of Famer

“A unicorn of a book…. a parable about American ambition, which feels like the exact window we need right now into our national psyche. This will go down as one of the greatest sports books ever, and one of the best books of the year period.”
—Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Barn

“No writer has ever gotten the quarterbacks who’ve become part of of our culture and part of our lives to reveal the nature and cost of their preeminence the way Seth has in the pages of his book… a book written in words that spiral.”
— Tom Junod, two-time National Magazine Award winner and author of In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man

“What elevates American Kings above most books about the QB – and there have been many – is its ambition. Wickersham wants to explain not just how the position works, but why it matters: how it reflects American ideas about leadership, masculinity, power, and self-invention.”
— Pigskin Books

“A must-read for all football fans, but of particular interest to Denver Broncos fans.”
— Broncos Wire / USA Today

“Football fans and pigskin prognosticators both will love this book in a snap.”
— The Miami Times

“Wickersham connects [the quarterback’s] pop-culture image to something older and more primal. The quarterback, he suggests, is the last acceptable hero in a skeptical age—an emblem of decisiveness, charisma and public faith.”
—Books by Page

“Exquisitely reported and researched… I was stunned with how he got Moon and Elway to open up. This is the best collection of QB stories, weaved into one book, that’s been put out there to date.”
—Mike Klis, 9News NBC Colorado

Seth Wickersham is a senior writer at ESPN and the author of two New York Times bestsellers, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback and It’s Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness.

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