"Bang the Drum Slowly" tells the fictional story of Bruce Pearson, a catcher for the New York Mammoths who is diagnosed with fatal cancer. It is told through the eyes of star pitcher Henry Wiggen, who is Pearson's roommate and closest friend on the team. The novel is the second of series of four, which detail Wiggen's Set during an indeterminate year—likely during the 1940s or early 50s (the novel was published in 1956). It tells how Pearson and Wiggen drive to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and receive Pearson's medical diagnosis. They are dogged by investigators working for the Mammoths, and throughout the story, the Mammoths ownership tries to pry the truth out of the pair. Wiggen eludes their inquiries (claiming the pair went to Minnesota on a fishing trip) because he knows if management discovers Pearson's condition, it will cut him from the team or send him to the minor leagues. Besides being ill, Pearson is slow-witted, and thus becomes a target for teammates to tease. As the baseball season progresses, Wiggen helps teach Pearson the game and urges teammates not to tease him so much. Eventually, Wiggen confides in another teammate, who tells his roommate, and word slowly spreads to the entire team. The title of the novel is a line from a popular song called "Streets of Laredo." Harris uses the song in the story to reveal that the rest of the team knows about Pearson's condition. In the locker room during a rain delay, a teammate is strumming a guitar and starts playing the song, which is about a cowboy who has been shot and knows he will die soon. Management knows about Pearson too, by now, but it is late in the season, and Pearson is playing well, though getting increasingly sick. He dies shortly after the baseball season ends. Wiggen is the only representative from the Mammoths at his funeral. "Bang the Drum Slowly" tells the story of friendship, life and death, and team. The final sentence in the novel, Henry Wiggen's reflection, "From here on in, I rag nobody," is recognized as one of the finest closing lines in literature, and Sports Illustrated magazine recently named "Bang the Drum Slowly" one of its top 100 all-time sports books.