Word: ring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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 for the way things "used...
...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...
...country, and of the effect the fixed Series had on Lardner's good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yardley speculates that the 1919 Series, which gamblers paid the favored White Sox to throw, was a topic that the two literary figures must have discussed together. Even more, he says, Ring's feelings must have inspired Fitzgerald to use that series "As yet another symbol of corruption in a novel filled with such symbols," in The Great Gatsby...
...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 quotes what he considers to be one of Lardner's greatest lines...