1. Rodney Stone Arthur Conan Doyle (1896)
Gives us a vivid description of the ring, the crowd around it and the procedure of the contestants at end of the 19th century.

2. The Man Who Laughs Victor Hugo (1869)
Hugo described how a ring is set up, what the duties of a second were, the stratagems of the contestants and the role of the referee.

3. Fat City Leonard Gardner (1969)
A bull’s eye fictional account of the back-streets of the fight world. “He has got it exactly right,” wrote the exacting Joan Didion.

4. The Abysmal Brute Jack London (1923)
A precursor of Ernest Hemingway, Jack London wrote the first American boxing novel. Having covered boxing as a journalist he knew whereof he wrote.

5. The Professional W. C. Heinz (1958)
Widely considered the classic novel on boxing, it is an accurate portrait of a journeyman fighter who sees the fight less as a sport than as a business.

6. Cashel Byron’s Profession George Bernard Shaw (1901)
He wrote the first boxing novel. As a friend of the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. It was a case of life imitating art.

Budd Schulberg is the author of the novel The Harder They Fall and the Academy-award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront. His latest book, Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage, is published by Mainstream. Buy it here

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy