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The Twilight Rounds

Rod Serling Explores the Dark Side of Boxing

Christopher Benedict Anne Serling Lady Tyger

$30.95   $28.22

Paperback

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English
Jobber House Press, LLC
21 August 2025
Award-winning writer Rod Serling revolutionized television with The Twilight Zone. His celebrated career, including bruising bouts with executives over censorship, is rooted in the boxing ring. Beginning with Serling's first ever published piece of work, a four-page boxing story featured in the March 1948 edition of the literary magazine The Antiochian,

called ""The Good Right Hand"" and extending far beyond the Peabody Award winning Requiem for a Heavyweight.

Rod Serling's boxing stories found humanity, poignancy, and pathos, even deep within violent spectacle of boxing. Serling's influence on the genre reverberates through modern big budget blockbuster boxing films like Rocky, Raging Bull, and Million Dollar Baby. Serling scholar and boxing expert Christopher Benedict ventures between the ring lights and the shadow of the screenplay to offer a deftly guided tour through Serling's personal and literary history with the controversial sport, including his time as a boxer in the Army.

Through ten incredible rounds you'll meet a salty cast of pugnacious pugilists and discover the unforgettable stories they inspired Rod Serling to create. The result is a knockout exploration of Serling's literary art and ""the sweet science"" which we call The Twilight Rounds.
By:  
Foreword by:  
Introduction by:  
Imprint:   Jobber House Press, LLC
Dimensions:   Height: 229mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 8mm
Weight:   213g
ISBN:   9798988609247
Pages:   152
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Christopher Benedict is a boxing writer, an elector for both the International Boxing Hall of Fame and International Women's Boxing Hall of Fame, a member of The Ring magazine's women's boxing ratings panel, and he served as a contributing archive researcher for the 2023 documentary Right To Fight. Benedict is the author of several boxing books, including Mandatory Eight Count, Hooking Off The Jab, You Can't Smash Stereotypes By Staying in the Neutral Corner, and I'm Not In The Business. I Am The Business. An advocate for women's boxing, his writings on the subject are featured and preserved on the WBAN (Women's Boxing Archive Network) Historical Database, founded and maintained by trailblazing prizefighter Sue 'Tiger Lilly' Fox. Benedict is a member of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. His science fiction, horror, and monster genre writing include, Needs Must When the Devil Drives, a book of essays on horror and sci-fi, which begins with a lengthy look inside Rod Serling's involvement in developing the 1968 film adaptation of Planet of the Apes. In September 2024, he was a featured presenter at SerlingFest: A Serling Centennial, delivering a lecture on his research on Rod Serling's boxing related stories at the Forum Theatre in Binghamton, New York. Anne Serling serves on the Board of Directors for the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation. She is author of the memoir As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling and contributed adaptations of two of her father's scripts to The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories anthology. Anne is the founder and an Editorial Board member of Rod Serling Books, an independent publishing house whose mission is to make his otherwise out of print work available and affordable. ""The Big, Tall Wish"" (More Stories from the Twilight Zone) and both the original teleplay (collected in Patterns) and movie tie-in novelization for Requiem for a Heavyweight are among them. Visit her at www.anneserling.com Lady Tyger Trimiar is a former boxer who broke down gender and racial barriers. After four years of legal battles, Tyger was one of the first three women to be granted professional boxing licenses by the New York State Athletic Commission in 1978. She competed in the first ever women's boxing matches held in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, headlined the inaugural all-female fight card in 1979, and won the Women's World Lightweight Championship. A tireless advocate for women's rights, Trimiar went on a 30-day hunger strike in 1987 to publicize the boxing establishment's discriminatory practices. She was inducted into the International Women's Boxing Hall of Fame (Class of 2016) and International Boxing Hall of Fame (Class of 2021).

Reviews for The Twilight Rounds: Rod Serling Explores the Dark Side of Boxing

""A brilliant ten-round biography of Serling's life through the extraordinary pathos of boxing"" -Malissa Smith, author of A History of Women's Boxing, and The Promise of Women's Boxing. ""Boxing expert and Serling aficionado Christopher Benedict is literally the only person who could have written this book. Rod Serling loved the sweet science and admired fighters and now, thanks to Chris, we have the first book that dissects Serling's meditations on the sport far beyond just Requiem for a Heavyweight. This is a knockout piece of work."" -Nicholas Parisi, President of The Rod Serling Memorial Foundation and author of Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination. The Twilight Rounds: Rod Serling Explores the Dark Side of Boxing, seamlessly intertwines a fascinating biography of Serling's short life, with a well- sourced, enjoyably cerebral, and engagingly visual examination of Serling's unforgettable boxing-related stories and characters of page and screen."" -Catherine Johnson, boxing historian and author of Then the World Moved On: The Brutal Truth Behind the Max Baer-Frankie Campbell Fight ""The Twilight Rounds: Rod Serling Explores the Dark Side of Boxing, focuses on a writer who once proclaimed, 'I've always liked fighting and fighters.' The beauty of Benedict's book is that it is more than just a biography of Serling the writer...This is an expert guide through the boxing-related stories and characters that Serling created, and is a highly informative and entertaining journey."" -Steve Hunt, host of The Boxing Movie Podcast and author of Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s ""Few writers have portrayed the degradations that boxing enacts on the body and soul with the profound empathy of screenwriter Rod Serling. Bless Chistopher Benedict for reacquainting us with this in The Twilight Rounds, and for his impassioned toil in providing us with the story behind the story of his journey through the world of smelly cigars and cauliflowered ears."" -Mark Kram, Jr., author of 'Smokin' Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier. ""A fascinating look at how Rod Serling's time in the boxing world left a lasting mark on his writing; shaping the tension, resilience, and moral complexity found throughout The Twilight Zone, but also impacting future writers who would take a page from Serling's writing manual. Here, Christopher Benedict reveals how the grit of this sport fueled Serling's storytelling and how he used stories and characters from the ring to create vastly different tales. It certainly managed to draw me in to that world - even as someone with no boxing knowledge whatsoever! "" -Emi O'Sullivan, co-Host of The After-Hours Podcast


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