Word: lardners
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...GRANDMOTHER used to read Ring Lardner's short stories aloud at the dinner table to my mother and her brother when they were little. She received, I am told, the kind of response most children give their parents when they try to share something they think is funny at the dinner table--mostly a polite laugh or two, but my grandmother loved Lardner, and somehow the dinner table readings remain implanted fondly in her daughter's memory...
When I asked an editor at the New York Daily News this summer what he knew or remembered about Ring Lardner, his eyebrows went up in an arch, and looking off into the distance, he said, "Lardner, now there was a fine journalist...
...Lardner is best remembered for the great number of baseball stories, news columns and short stories which captured the essence of American life at the turn of the century. Reading Lardner's work is almost more of a lesson in American history than pure pleasure reading, and it follows that Jonathan Yardley's biography of the legendary journalist, Ring, is almost more of a history book than a biography. But it is a book of the sort that true lovers of baseball and a "progressive" minded American society can relish, perhaps with an added touch of jealousy...
...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...