LARDNER, RING W. 1885-1933

WRITER

Sportswriter

Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was the last master of American vernacular humor. Born in Niles, Michigan, he briefly studied engineering; but newspapers were his college at a time when most American writers came out of the newsrooms. Starting as a sports reporter for the South Bend Times, in 1919 he took over "In the Wake of the News," the widely read Chicago Tribune sports column. Lardner filled his daily columns with verse, parody, and short fiction.

You Know Me AL

In 1914 he published his first short story, "A Busher's Letters Home," which initiated the highly popular You Know Me Al series. These stories consist of quasi-literate letters written by an ignorant, boastful, dishonest, mean baseball pitcher. Known as the Busher stories, they established Lardner's reputation as a slang writer. H. L. Mencken observed in The American Language that "Lardner reports the common speech not only with humor, but also with the utmost accuracy." These stories solidified Lardner's fame as a writer of baseball fiction, although the range of his later stories extended to show business, the new leisure class, and marriage. His most widely reprinted story, "Champion"—about a corrupt fighter—appeared in 1916. The success of his magazine work enabled Lardner to give up the grind of a daily column. In 1919 he moved to Long Island to write a weekly "Letter" for the Bell Syndicate while writing short stories; he never wrote a novel.

Best Stories

Lardner wrote his best stories during the 1920s—including "Golden Honeymoon," "The Love Nest," "Hair Cut," "Some Like Them Cold," and "There Are Smiles"—which he published in volumes titled How to Write Short Stories (with samples), The Love Nest, and Round Up. His 1925 volume What Of It? included sketches that were credited with bringing Dada, a European avant-garde movement that proclaimed the absurdity of life and art, to American humor. Lardner's "I. Gaspiri (The Upholsterers)" had this stage direction: "The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week." He also worked in the theater, writing songs, sketches, and plays. June Moon, based on "Some Like Them Cold," on which he collaborated with George S. Kaufman in 1929, had a successful Broadway run.

Lasting Achievement

Lardner and F. Scott Fitzgerald became close friends when they were neighbors during 1923-1924. Fitzgerald brought him to Charles Scribner's Sons publishers and based Abe North in Tender Is the Night on Lardner. After Lardner died from tuberculosis, heart disease, and alcoholism, Fitzgerald wrote that "whatever Ring's achievement was, it fell short of the achievement he was capable of, and this because of a cynical attitude toward his work." It was Fitzgerald's analysis that Lardner was unable to develop high literary ambitions because he had been stifled by his sports-desk apprenticeship. Nonetheless, Ring Lardner's work holds up—not as curiosities or nostalgia, but as American literature.