Word: lardners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...along: baseball was all he wanted out of life. The small kid who had cried over lost basketball games took naturally to the habits of grown men who sat around and brooded, morose and silent, after a defeat on the diamond. Like all baseballers before and since Ring Lardner's busher, he learned the tired routine for killing time on the road, "the one bad thing about baseball," says he. He went to every movie in town ("I don't care what's playing; I like 'em all"), slept for long hours, read the sports pages...
...another letter to the editor, Ring Lardner Jr.. one of the "Hollywood Ten." wondered whether the kind of one-man worship so deplorable in Stalin's case might not have influenced the "rather maudlin testaments to William Z. Foster on his recent birthday." In the same sentence, evidently feeling no inconsistency. Lardner described U.S. Communist Boss Foster as "America's outstanding working-class leader...
...Ring Lardner who made the first serious attempt in fiction to find out if baseball players are people. His answer in the You Know Me, Al stories could be boiled down to yes, with reservations. Now, 40 years later, both sportswriters and novelists seem to have fewer reservations. In Bernard Malamud's The Natural (TIME, Sept. 8, 1952), there was the mystical intimation that major-leaguers might even have souls. In Bang the Drum Slowly, Novelist Mark (The Southpaw) Harris modestly stays closer to the bag. Look, he says, they are human, and their hearts can hurt as much...
...than a touch of locker-room obscenity. If the characters are no more than onedimensional, it is a dimension that Harris has measured with his heart as well as his eye and ear. It is true that Author Harris' major success lies in stirring up reminders of Ring Lardner, but it is equally true that not many people now writing can do that much...
...broke down and printed the first story about Ty Cobb. Long after his spectacular career was over, Cobb confessed to Rice that he wrote and sent all the messages himself. Once, when President Harding invited him to Washington to play golf, Rice brought along his pal Ring Lardner. The President, a little puzzled, asked why Long Islander Lardner was there. "I want to be appointed Ambassador to Greece," said Ring. "Why?" asked Harding. "My wife doesn't like Great Neck," Lardner said...