Word: lardners
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...atrocious taste in socks but can quote Browning). Touches of class cater to the tough-guy fantasies of the literati. Albert Camus, whose spare existential novels were influenced by U.S. detective fiction, looked like Humphrey Bogart portraying Sam Spade. Hemingway followed in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. But it is hard to read such terse narratives as The Killers and To Have and Have Not without imagining gumshoe tracks leading back to Black Mask magazine...
...have been here before. George Plimpton humiliated himself with the pros. Roger Angell has described a pitcher standing on a "hill like (a) sunstruck archaeologist at Knossos." John Updike, Ring Lardner, Philip Roth, Mark Harris, Robert Coover and other "serious" writers have regarded baseball as a metaphor for the human predicament. What can a puffing 56- year-old add to the overloaded shelf of belles lettres on the summer game...
Miss Jennie Jerome, daughter of a Wall Street broker, married one of the Churchills of Blenheim Palace, and a whole generation of debutantes sailed across the Atlantic in hopes of doing as well. By contrast, one of Ring Lardner's social-climbing heroines went to stay in an extravagantly expensive Palm Beach hotel in the hope of meeting a grandee like the Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago. When she finally did encounter her in a corridor, Lardner's narrator relates, the great lady only said to her: "Please see that they's some towels...
...literature that the sport has inspired, it is Bernard Malamud who best combined the mythic and the realistic streams of America's baseball consciousness. The Natural, published in 1952, reads as if Ring Lardner and Sir Thomas Malory had simultaneously invaded Malamud's sensibility, joining their gifts to produce an almost flawless first novel...
...West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland." That kind of screwball is still pitched effectively by Monty Python, but it is not a sign of seniority. Virginia Woolf believed that Ring Lardner had "talents of a remarkable order." And so he had. But the episode from You Know Me Al leans hard on misspelling and false naiveté, favorite devices of the novice: "Florrie thinks she has got to have a new dress though she has got two changes of cloths...