Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

Ring Lardner grew up in a comfortable middle-class Episcopalian home in Michigan, then became a reporter and found himself in the middle of the colorful world of Chicago professional sports. A graduate of the Armour Institute of Technology, Lardner happened upon journalism, but it proved to be his calling. He started out at the South Bend Times and moved on to editorial positions at "Sporting News" and the "Boston American" before tackling Chicago, where he became one of the city's best-loved sportswriters.

Unlike many other writers who abandoned journalism once they published work on their own, Lardner never stopped reporting. His stories gave him an outlet to write about the sometimes-shady men who hid behind their images as squeaky-clean sports heroes. "You Know Me Al," a collection of short stories so interconnected that the book can almost be called a novel, introduces several of Lardner's stock characters: baseball pitcher Jack Keefe, detective Fred Gross, and office worker Gullible.

Already popular among the Chicagoans who knew his work from the newspapers, Lardner gained a wider audience in 1924, when F. Scott Fitzgerald took notice of Lardner's latest collection. Fitzgerald arranged for "How To Write Short Stories (With Samples)" to be published by Scribner's under the direction of his own editor, Maxwell Perkins, and literary critics began paying attention to Lardner's work.

"How to Write Short Stories" also introduced a new, darker character to Lardner's readers, the sullen, violent boxer Midge Kelly. Critics note that the gentle satire Lardner had used in "You Know Me Al" becomes darker and more pointed in Lardner's works of the 1920s.

Works:

• Bib Ballads, 1915
• You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters, 1916
• Gullible's Travels, Etc., 1917
• Treat 'Em Rough: Letters from Jack the Kaiser Killer, 1918
• My Four Weeks in France, 1918
• The Real Dope, 1919
• Own Your Own Home, 1919
• Regular Fellows I Have Met, 1919
• Symptoms of Being Thirty-Five, 1921
• The Big Town: How I and the Mrs. Go To New York to See Life and Get Katie a Husband, 1921
• Say It With Oil: A Few Remarks About Wives, 1923
• How to Write Short Stories (With Samples), 1924 0827414315
• What of It? 1925
• The Love Nest, and Other Stories by Ring W. Lardner, 1926
• The Story of a Wonder Man: Being the Autobiography of Ring Lardner, 1927
• Round-Up: The Stories of Ring W. Lardner, 1929
• Lose with a Smile, 1933
• First and Last, 1934

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