About the Author • Author Interview
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Every golfer's bookshelf contains at least one—and usually many more—of the countless instructional tomes that have been published about the game. Additional instructional material, including more tips than most waiters realize in a fortnight, are available in magazines. Tens of thousands of professionals are ready and willing to teach the game.

All of those instructional materials, however, share two common elements that The Care and Feeding of the True Duffer: A Guide to Golf in the Real World does not:

1) They are written by those who play or teach the game for a living;

2) They are not packed with uproariously hilarious anecdotes with which duffers readily can identify, which The Care and Feeding of the True Duffer most decidedly is.

Those are among the reasons why Dr. Dennis Vannatta, an English professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, wrote The Care and Feeding of the True Duffer. It is the definitive work on duffers by a duffer who can identify with their plight.

"There are dozens of good golf guides out there, many of them aimed at the beginning golfer or duffer—not the same thing by my definition," Vannatta said. "And every one of these books, I'll freely admit, is written by someone who knows more about the correct way to swing a club than I do. But I think that's a problem. These guys are pros, either professional tournament golfers, instructors or both. They work toward the ideal swing themselves—and occasionally, at least, achieve it. And that's what they want us duffers to achieve by following to the letter what they recommend and practicing until that ideal swing is achieved—or at least approximated. But the true duffer—and I spend a lot of time in the book identifying this species—either cannot or will not make the effort toward obtaining the ideal swing. He won't play on those Masters-like courses. He won't buy the best clubs. He won't practice. He probably cannot physically hit the ball correctly. He has no natural talent. But he still loves the game, and I think there's a place in the golf world for a book that addresses, embraces and encourages those golfers to whom the pro would throw up his hands in disgust."

Vannatta's outlandishly hilarious look at golf—and his 40-year love affair with a game that he hardly has mastered and candidly admits he never will—actually can improve duffers' games by providing instructional material they easily can understand and offers plenty of tips not only on how they can save strokes, but guaranteed methods to save money on everything from equipment to lessons.

And while duffers who embrace The Care and Feeding of the True Duffer might save strokes and are certain to save money on their favorite pastime, they're also guaranteed to find this to be one of the funniest and most insightful books they've ever read.

Although The Care and Feeding of the True Duffer is Vannatta's first book about golf, it is the award-winning author's eighth book. His previous works include four on literary criticism—Nathanael West: An Annotated Bibliography of the Scholarship and Works; H.E. Bates; The English Short Story, 1945-1980: A Critical History, and Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Vannatta subsequently wrote three collections of short stories—This Time, This Place: Stories; Players for the Dead: Stories, and Lives of the Artists: Stories. He was awarded a Pushcart Prize for the short story in 1991.