Harvard Club of Minnesota

Harvard Book Club - Seabiscuit

Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand

Tuesday, February 24th 2026
7:30 pm to 9:00 CDT by Zoom

Publication Date 2001

It is about Thoroughbred racing.
 Really, Thoroughbred racing?

In case you didn't know (I didn't know), Seabiscuit was a horse.
A great horse, frequently cited as the best ever, running in one of the worst decades ever, The Great Depression.  And therein is the interest, 

A great narrative of nonfiction that reads like a novel.

Among the accolades: engaging and often poetic, beautiful craftsmanship, dramatic capsule of Depression history.

Mark the date and time - Tuesday, February 17th 2026, 7:30 to 9:00 PM, CST

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken comes a universal underdog story about the horse who came out of nowhere to become a legend.

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit’s fortunes:

Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon.
 

E-mail admin@harvardmn.org or phone 612-554-1378 to register.  Zoom info will be given when you register.

Noteworthy, the Classic Fiction Book Club has expanded to include non-classics and non-fiction and is now called the Harvard Book Club.