A short life of the author
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner (6 March 1885 – 25 September 1933) was an American short story writer, journalist, humorist, and playwright who possessed one of the most perfect ears for American speech in the history of American literature. His stories — written in the first person, in the voice of baseball players, barbers, nurses, songwriters, and small-town Americans of every description — are simultaneously hilarious and merciless: Lardner loved the sound of American English and despised the stupidity, cruelty, and self-deception that it so often expressed.
Early Life and Sports Writing
Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan, the youngest of nine children in a prosperous family. He attended the Armour Institute of Technology briefly, then drifted into newspaper work, covering baseball for the South Bend Times, the Chicago Examiner, the Chicago Tribune, and other papers. His baseball columns — particularly the “In the Wake of the News” column for the Tribune — were wildly popular, and they gave Lardner the material and the voice that would define his fiction.
Lardner was not merely a sportswriter; he was a student of language. He listened to the way ballplayers talked — the malapropisms, the boasts, the alibis, the clichés deployed with unconscious precision — and he reproduced their speech with an accuracy that was simultaneously comic and anthropological.
You Know Me Al (1916)
Lardner’s first book collects the letters of Jack Keefe, a bush-league pitcher who has made it to the Chicago White Sox, to his friend Al back home. Jack is supremely confident in his own talent, consistently wrong about everything, and completely unable to see himself as others see him. His letters — full of grammatical errors, logical contradictions, transparent self-justification, and accidentally revealing admissions — create a portrait of American self-delusion that is both very funny and subtly devastating.
You Know Me Al was acclaimed by critics (Virginia Woolf praised it) and beloved by readers, and it established Lardner as a major literary figure rather than merely a popular journalist. The book’s epistolary form — the unreliable narrator exposing himself through his own words — anticipates techniques that would later be associated with literary modernism.
The Short Stories
Lardner’s reputation rests ultimately on a handful of short stories that are among the finest in American literature. “Haircut” (1925) — narrated by a small-town barber who tells a visitor about the town’s “great kidder,” Jim Kendall, without realising that Kendall is a sadistic bully and that his death was not an accident but a justified killing — is one of the most perfect examples of the unreliable narrator in English fiction. The barber’s cheerful, admiring tone makes Kendall’s cruelty more horrifying, not less: the reader understands what the narrator cannot.
“Some Like Them Cold” (1921) is an exchange of letters between a man and a woman who met briefly at a Chicago train station. Their correspondence reveals, with surgical precision, the man’s casual selfishness and the woman’s deepening emotional investment, and the story’s final twist — the man’s announcement of his marriage to another woman — is delivered with an offhandedness that is devastating.
“The Golden Honeymoon” (1922) follows an elderly couple on their Florida vacation, narrated by the husband in a voice of relentless, oblivious self-satisfaction that gradually reveals a marriage built on competition, resentment, and the determination to win petty victories. “Champion” (1916) is a brutal story about a boxer whose viciousness is rewarded by a sports press that manufactures a heroic public image to sell tickets.
How to Write Short Stories [with Samples] (1924)
Lardner’s first major story collection — whose title is itself a joke, as the “how to write” introductions bear no relation to the stories that follow — established him definitively as a literary artist rather than a mere humorist. The collection includes “My Roomy,” “Champion,” “Some Like Them Cold,” and “The Golden Honeymoon,” and it was praised by Edmund Wilson, H.L. Mencken, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Friendship with Fitzgerald
Lardner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were neighbours in Great Neck, Long Island, in the early 1920s, and their friendship — the older, alcoholic Lardner and the younger, alcoholic Fitzgerald — is one of the poignant episodes in American literary history. Fitzgerald admired Lardner’s craft and tried to convince him to write a novel, believing that Lardner’s talent deserved a larger canvas. Lardner never did, perhaps because the short story suited his genius better, perhaps because alcoholism and despair had already begun their work.
Decline and Death
Lardner’s later years were marked by alcoholism, illness, and a growing misanthropy that seeped into his work. His stories became darker, more bitter, and less commercially successful. He wrote plays and screenplays without distinction. He died of tuberculosis in 1933, at forty-eight. His son Ring Lardner Jr. became a successful screenwriter and one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
Critical Standing
Lardner’s critical reputation has fluctuated. During his lifetime, he was enormously popular but not always taken seriously as a literary figure. Fitzgerald, Mencken, and Wilson championed him; others dismissed him as a sports humorist. Time has vindicated the champions: Lardner’s best stories are now recognised as masterworks of American short fiction, comparable in quality to those of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and superior in their ear for vernacular speech.
Collecting Lardner
You Know Me Al (1916, George H. Doran) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible, typically bringing $500–$2,000. How to Write Short Stories (1924, Scribner’s) first editions are also sought. Lardner’s earlier journalism and baseball writing is of interest to sports collectors.