As a boy, Lipsyte did play Chinese handball against the sides of brick buildings and participated in street games such as stickball, but he felt acute pressure to excel at sports which discouraged his interest.

This experience later developed into a major theme in some of Lipsyte's nonfiction works such as SportsWorld and novels like Jock and Jill (1982) and his trilogy beginning with One Fat Summer (1977).

Although he is not anti-sport, he is disillusioned by a culture of champions that he calls “Sportsworld.” SportsWorld, as Lipsyte points out in the book by that name, “is a grotesque distortion of sports.” It honors the winner more than the race.

In it, the protagonist, Fred Bauer, an ordinary high school junior in almost every way, discovers he has cancer and undergoes a series of experimental hormone treatments.

another country, scary and strange.” Basing his accounts on his own experiences, as well as those of other family members, he comforts, advises, warns, and informs the reader with tenderness, insight, and wit.

[6] The ALA Margaret A. Edwards Award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work for "significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature".

According to the citation, "The Contender and its sequels, The Brave and The Chief transformed the sports novel to authentic literature with their gritty depiction of the boxing world.

The same theme appears in the humorous One Fat Summer, in which an overweight boy deals with the timeless angst of body image and which was adapted by David Scearce into the 2018 film Measure of a Man.

"[1] At one point, One Fat Summer was removed from the syllabus of the Levittown, New York public school system after complaints were made about its depiction of its teenage protagonist's sexual fantasies.