Word: lardner
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Stomach Hake" "Even to this day," confesses Funnyman Lardner,* "the first week in March is set aside in Niles [Mich.] as 'Have a Baby Week.'" He came in there like a lion one March "before they had horses and boats and when you wanted to go from one town to another, you had to take a train." Graduates of the Lytton Strachey school of informal biography may suspect Mr. Lardner of shoving fun at their alma mater, the way he takes liberties with prominent names and dates in trying to solve the enigma of himself in an intimate...
...after the story is under way, no fairminded reader will deny that Mr. Lardner is doing his flat and level best not to get funny. Chapter Six begins: "It was at a petting party in the Whits House that I first met Jane Austen." He took her to see Gov. Al ("Peaches") Smith, who complimented her: "I thought The Green Hat was a scream...
...autobiography will sell these days without some pranks at Yale. So Mr. Lardner recalls football days under John Paul Jones, a grandfather of Coach Tad Jones. He tells how a big guard named Heffelfinger got called down for unclean nails; how Brinck Thorne got his neck tickled by Ted Coy. There actually are three men by those names, and Mr. Lardner knows it. Books have been written before this on the theory that people dislike seeing their names in print and will pay $1.75 to keep at least one copy out of circulation...
...that--as Miss Lillie remarks--"schools" of the arts rise like mushrooms in the American common wealth. There is the Valentino school of romantic acting, still flourishing although its originator has joined the immortals. And there is the Hearst school of journalism, the Herrin school of gun-toting, the Lardner school of bon-mots--schools innumerable. The latest addition to the ranks would appear to be the academy of Edna St. Vincent Millay; at least Edmund Wilson in the Nation, has named Miss Millay as the muse of Dorothy Parker, who has just emerged from the aureate glow...
...betters is edifying but to express one's own personality is more amusing. Ring Lardner can convulse It is readers with a tense drama, the scene of which is laid on a bath mat. Very few Englishmen, however, and very few Victorians would see any humor in Mr. Lardner. And similarly with Donald Ogden Stewart, Robert Benchley--although he is more universal than the rest--and Milt Gross. The fact that there are at least five magazines who make a business of culling their material from the files of university and college publications all over the nation would appear...