Word: lardner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...difficult to imagine a more complete collection of a man's work and life than the quantity of material Yardley, a 1968-69 Nieman Fellow, compiled in Ring. He begins the book with the essence of Lardner's world, Frank Chance's baseball diamond, and traces his writing career to its sad, unfulfilled end. Baseball, to Lardner, was an American institution. He loved the players, and revered them as heroes the way most of America did--but Lardner's coverage of the White Sox for the Chicago Tribune was much more than sports-writing. The spectators held just as much...
...Lardner covered major league baseball from 1908 to 1913, and later wrote about it frequently in his columns. Yardley's fascination for the game, as well as Lardner's, is evident throughout the first half of the biography. Lardner's falling out with big-league baseball after the infamous "Black Sox" World Series of 1919 appears to be as much of a dissapointment to his biographer as it was for Lardner. Yardley writes extensively of the disillusionment the scandalous affair caused throughout the country, and of the effect the fixed Series had on Lardner's good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald...
ALTHOUGH baseball influenced much of Lardner's earlier work, he stopped writing about the game after 1919 and took on practically every available topic on American life, including politics. He became most famous, though, for his short nonsense pieces and a weekly letter written for his nationally syndicated newspaper column. Lardner had a national following which today can only be compared to Jimmy Breslin, although the styles of the two differ tremendously--Breslin writing about busing riots and massive looting in a New York City blackout, while Lardner chose a much lighter subject matter, depicting the lives of boxers...
...reason people loved Lardner, says Yardley, was because he managed to capture a scene perfectly and the response of his readers was "Yes, that's exactly how it is." Yardley is especially fond of Lardner's ability to "distinguish the subtleties of the way people talked and thought and then to turn them into effective fiction." Because Lardner's books were never best-sellers, the assumption is that he achieved his popularity in the media--for instance, his stories which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and New Yorker were more successful than such books as "You Know...
...that "what is considered a real howl of a story--as far as newspaper humor stories goes, often winds up being very unfunny years later when you go back to look at it--because when the news goes out of it, the heart goes out of it,." Some of Lardner's work, however, is timeless. One such piece was originally written for the Saturday Evening Post in 1920, entitles "The Young Immigrunts." It's written in the voice of a nine-year-old boy, perhaps Ring's son. As Ring as his son head for their home in Connecticut, Yardley...