Word: yardley
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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...
...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...
...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...
...Ring, Yardley has attempted to portray Lardner largely through his work. He offers comments which are essential to providing an understanding of the era. Also included, however, is a section on Lardner's courtship with his future wife, Ellis. Because Lardner was traveling with the White Sox throughout his courtship, he and Ellis rarely saw one another. They wrote each other constantly, however, and the letters reveal Ring's charm and innocence. At a later point in their relationship, Ring has been looking for an apartment for the soon to be married couple. He writes Ellis, describing a place...
...LETTERS are the only original source materials Yardley has access to, besides the conversations with Ring's friends which Donald Elder provided in the only other Lardner biography in existence. Ring, if it misses anything, is lacking in any real insights into Lardner's personality. Yet Yardley can hardly be faulted for this, because all of Ring's friends are long gone. One is left wondering, for instance, why Lardner projected such a severe image, as revealed by many of the pictures Yardley has gathered of him. Lardner never looks happy, and Yardley mentions one factor which may have contributed...