Word: lardner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...epigraphs can be embarrassing, especially if they are better than the prose that follows. Busch rashly prefaces a chapter that deals with a child's illegitimacy with Ring Lardner's grand old gag about the bumpkin who remarks, on learning that his friend was born out of wedlock, "That's mighty pretty country around there." Lardner's act is hard to follow, and by comparison, Busch's novel is as solemn as a convocation of bishops. Its most egregious epigraphy comes before the climactic scene. The book's central figure, a bombastic newspaper publisher...
Just as Ring Lardner warned, back in 1920, sports reporters who covered the America's Cup discovered that a yacht race rarely measures up in excitement to any old sixth at Belmont. Worse yet, most of the 241 reporters and photographers (44 papers, four press associations, 23 magazines) who uneasily went down to the sea in ships were landlubbers with no tongue for salty jargon...
...reporters accustomed to sprints and serves, pitches and passes, it was rarely more exciting than watching grass grow. Between yawns, the New York Herald Tribune's, Columnist Red Smith got off a series of wryscracks that hearkened back to Ring Lardner and 1920: "Next to being smitten on the brow with a bung starter, there is no more effective soporific than watching a pair of sailboats race for the America's Cup. It is a spectacle calculated to make the tea break in a cricket test seem wildly exciting...
...Until his death in 1947, Perkins, as editor of Charles Scribner's Sons, was literary nurse to such authors as Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In Wolfe's case he was also surgeon, cut and helped revise the huge, sprawling manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel...
...took a rest over Sunday, and it ain't like they didn't need it. If they was a doctor in the house his advice to the delegates would be to stay quietly in bed a few days and try and sip down a little clam juice." RING LARDNER...