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Ring Lardner

Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan in 1885. He studied engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, but did not complete his first semester. In 1907, Lardner obtained his first job as journalist with the South Bend Times. Six years later, he published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by ‘Jack Keefe’, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. A huge hit, the book earned the appreciation of Virginia Woolf and others.

Lardner went on to write such well-known short stories as ‘Haircut’, ‘Some Like Them Cold’, ‘The Golden Honeymoon’, ‘Alibi Ike’, and ‘A Day with Conrad Green’. He also continued to write follow-up stories to You Know Me Al, with the hero of that book, the headstrong but gullible Jack Keefe, experiencing various ups and downs in his major league career and in his personal life. Private Keefe’s World War I letters home to his friend Al were collected in Treat ‘Em Rough (1918).

Aside from his much-loved short stories, Lardner was also a well-known sports columnist. From 1909 onwards, he penned the humorous baseball column ‘Pullman Pastimes’ for Taylor Spink and the Sporting News in St, Louis. In 1913, he began his syndicated ‘In the Wake of the News’ column; it appeared in more than a hundred newspapers, and still runs in the Tribune.

Lardner was a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers of the Jazz Age. He was published by Maxwell Perkins, who also served as Fitzgerald’s editor, and served as the model for the tragic character Abe North in Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Lardner also influenced Ernest Hemingway, who sometimes wrote articles for his high school newspaper under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr. Lardner died in 1933, aged 48, of complications from tuberculosis.