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Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings

Edited by Ian Frazier

“The generous, 961-page anthology edited by Ian Frazier strikes a balance between signature masterworks and unearthed treasures in attempting to capture the sweep of Lardner’s prolific output during his short life. . . . As with Twain, the Michigan-born Lardner’s most memorable stories were grounded in his Midwestern sensibility and were devastating, character-driven exposes of the hypocrisies and blithe cruelties of life not only in the big cities but in small-town America as well.”—Chicago Tribune

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “Kid’s Strategy Goes Amuck as Jake Doesn’t Die,” Ring Lardner
April 2, 2024

Story of the Week Ring Lardner, “Rhythm”
March 31, 2022

Story of the Week Ring Lardner, “A Day with Conrad Green”
January 22, 2021

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In the heady years of the Jazz Age, Ring Lardner was America’s favorite humorist, a prodigally talented improviser equally admired by a popular audience and by literary friends such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. Like Mark Twain before him and James Thurber after, he was a master of many forms and moods, his literary signatures being a virtuoso, surrealistic tomfoolery that looks forward to S. J. Perelman and a dark edginess that feels contemporary.

Now, The Library of America and editor Ian Frazier celebrate his achievement with a major collection of Lardner’s most enduring work. Here, in one volume for the first time, are the finest stories, the full texts of You Know Me Al, The Big Town, and the long out-of-print The Real Dope, and a generous sampling of humor pieces, sports reporting, song lyrics, surrealist playlets, and letters.

Lardner began as a Chicago-based sports writer, and it was in the jargon of ball players that he wrote You Know Me Al (1916), the best-selling work that launched his literary career and earned the admiration of writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and H. L. Mencken. Comprising the unvarnished letters of its comically self-admiring hero, bush-leaguer turned big-leaguer Jack Keefe, You Know Me Al’s brilliant burlesque of the egotism of sports stardom remains as fresh as ever. Lardner’s unrivaled ear for the rhythms and hilarious oddities of the American language as actually spoken was matched by a rare gift for inspired nonsense, whether he was writing a travel narrative from the vantage point of a four-year-old (The Young Immigrunts), a play set in “the Outskirts of a Parchesi Board,” or the story of Red Riding Hood “like I tell it to my little ones when they wake up in the morning with a headache after a tough night.”

Lardner could find something to laugh about in the tiniest circumstance, but all the laughter could not mask the sardonic view he often took of the lives he described. Sharp and dispassionately observant of the American scene, his best stories (among them such masterpieces as “The Golden Honeymoon,” “Haircut,” “The Love Nest,” “A Day with Conrad Green,” and “Who Dealt?”) cast a devastating eye on the hypocrisies and prejudices of everyday life. His garrulous narrators, blissfully devoid of self-knowledge, are given just enough room to reveal themselves in all their petty scheming and unacknowledged resentment.

Equal parts antic and acerbic, here is a body of writing that Mencken called a “mine of authentic Americana.” (Lardner’s play June Moon, which he co-authored with George S. Kaufman, is collected in George S. Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies.)

Ian Frazier, editor, is a writer and humorist and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He is author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father, and Coyote v. Acme, among other acclaimed works. He is the first two-time winner of the James Thurber Prize for American Humor.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week “Kid’s Strategy Goes Amuck as Jake Doesn’t Die,” Ring Lardner
April 2, 2024

Story of the Week Ring Lardner, “Rhythm”
March 31, 2022

Story of the Week Ring Lardner, “A Day with Conrad Green”
January 22, 2021

Story of the Week Ring Lardner, “Quick Returns”
March 13, 2020

Interviews Ian Frazier on why Ring Lardner is “a major figure in twentieth-century letters”
April 23, 2019
Table of Contents

You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters

from Gullible’s Travels, Etc
Carmen
Gullible’s Travels

The Real Dope

The Young Immigrunts

The Big Town

from How to Write Short Stories (With Samples)
Preface
My Roomy
Alibi Ike
Champion
Some Like Them Cold
A Caddy’s Diary
The Golden Honeymoon

from The Love Nest and Other Stories
Haircut
Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It
Zone of Quiet
Women
The Love Nest
A Day with Conrad Green
Who Dealt?
Rhythm

from Round Up
Travelogue
I Can’t Breathe
Sun Cured
Liberty Hall
There Are Smiles
Ex Parte
Old Folks’ Christmas

Uncollected Stories
Second-Act Curtain
Bob’s Birthday
Poodle
Widow

Sketches and Reporting
Tyrus
(from) My Four Weeks in France
Ring Lardner—Himself
A Literary Diary
The Dames
Bed-Time Stories
“In Conference”
Prohibition
Tennis by Cable
Who’s Who
On Conversation
(from) The Other Side
Insomnia
Eckie
Odd’s Bodkins

Plays
The Bull Pen
I. Gaspiri
Taxidea Americana
Clemo Uti—“The Water Lilies”
Cora, or Fun at a Spa
Dinner Bridge
Abend di Anni Nouveau
Quadroon
The Tridget of Greva
Thompson’s Vacation

Song Lyrics
Gee! It’s a Wonderful Game
Prohibition Blues
You Can’t Get Along Without Me
I’ll Never Be Young Again
We’re All Just One Big Family

Letters

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-253-1 961 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 244 Library of America Series

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