Lardner, Ring (1885-1933)

Ring Lardner's cynical humor made him one of the most popular writers of the 1920s. Throughout his career, first as a sports writer and columnist and then as the author of short stories, light verse and plays, Lardner's works received both popular and critical acclaim. He was recognized as one of the foremost humorists and satirists of the early twentieth century and was noted especially for his memorable use of slang vernacular to characterize and often ridicule his subjects.

Lardner was born in an affluent Michigan family and educated at home during his early childhood. As a youth, he played baseball and enjoyed music. He attended Niles High School where he played football, sang in a quartet, and wrote the class poem. He then worked in minor capacities in Chicago offices and for the Michigan Railroad before a year of college at the Armour Institute in Chicago to study engineering. He dropped out of college and began his career in 1905 writing for various Chicago newspapers.

Within five years, by 1910, his perceptive and entertaining style made him nationally known as a sports journalist and columnist. His sense of humor allowed him to report on even dull games in an engaging manner by including personal anecdotes about the players and winning the favor of fans and the athletes themselves. At the height of his career as a sports writer, his columns were syndicated to approximately 120 newspapers. His enthusiastic and informal style of reporting became a standard for sports journalists and commentators that still exists at the end of the twentieth century.

In 1914, The Saturday Evening Post published the first of the baseball stories for which Lardner was to become famous as a fiction writer. These first-person epistolary stories were an instant success. The critics and the public loved Lardner's use of slang vernacular and keen wit. The stories take the form of letters written to a friend back home by a belligerent, young pitcher for the Chicago White Sox. They tell of his raucous adventures while traveling and playing with the team. What started out as a humorous serial enjoyed by thousands of newspaper readers became, in 1916, the collection, You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters. The narrator, Jack Keefe, came to be known as an irrepressibly asinine character whose life, because of his dimwitted pugnacity, bordered on grotesque and tragic. These stories and Lardner's subsequent publications became a standard for later sports fiction in their use of the vernacular and their humorous characterizations of the athlete.

Lardner's tales progressed from stories about baseball to satirical observations of American life overall. He pointed out the stupidity, vapidity, and cruelty of common people including salesmen, stenographers, stockbrokers, songwriters, athletes, barbers, and actresses—the gamut of middle-class America. When he published How to Write Short Stories in 1924, and his subsequent collections mocking the commonplace, he received praise from such noteworthy critics as Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, and Virginia Woolf. The nation came to regard him as the new Mark Twain.

In 1933, Lardner died of a heart attack. He had published several plays, light verse, 14 full-length collections of his essays and stories, and over 4,500 newspaper articles. His career kept him in the literary spotlight through the Roaring 1920s when Americans were generally looking for excitement and were ready to find fault with humdrum life. His timing as a satirist of the commonplace put him in the forefront of American fiction during the first half of the twentieth century. By the latter half of the century, Lardner dropped out of the canon of American literature. A few of his stories ("Haircut," "Some Like Them Cold," and "Golden Honeymoon") occasionally appeared in anthologies, but as Jonathan Yardley suggested in Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner (1976), "Lardner's literary reputation remains uncertain and his influence is often misunderstood. It is time to give him his due."

—Sharon Brown

Further Reading:

Elder, Donald. Ring Lardner. Garden City, New York, Doubleday,1956.

Evans, Elizabeth. Ring Lardner. New York, Ungar, 1979.

Geismar, Maxwell. Ring Lardner and the Portrait of Folly. New York, Crowell, 1972.

Lardner, Ring, Jr. The Lardners: My Family Remembered. New York, Harper and Row, 1976.

Yardley, Jonathan. Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner. New York, Random House, 1977.