Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

H. G. Bissinger is an American author and former journalist from New York City. Bissinger shares in the prologue of Friday Night Lights that as an avid sports fan, he wanted to explore the role of football in small-town America and decided to move to Odessa due to its reputation as a fanatical football town. Bissinger’s background as a successful journalist prepared him for his year of writing the book. Bissinger’s commitment to long-term participant observation in Odessa allowed him to be a ‘fly on the wall’ in the town’s schools, businesses, churches, and homes, giving him the access he needed to thoroughly investigate the different social and economic factors that informed the local culture.

That Bissinger is a white person was also helpful to him since Odessa in the late 1980s was only newly desegregated, and many white Odessans were frequently explicitly racist against Black people and Hispanic people. The author benefitted from his race by being accepted by the white townspeople and gaining access to their events, businesses, and homes. While Bissinger sometimes reveals his thoughts and opinions, much of his work has an objective and matter-of-fact journalistic tone.