The Short Fiction of Ring Lardner

Ring Lardner made his name writing about baseball, but the stories gathered here range far past the ballpark. He wrote in the flat, self-deceiving voice of ordinary Americans, salesmen, ballplayers, bridge partners, and let them expose their own vanity and small cruelties without a narrator stepping in to judge. Pieces such as “Haircut,” “Champion,” “Alibi Ike,” and “The Golden Honeymoon” show his gift for the ear, with dialogue that sounds exactly like real speech while it quietly turns bitter. Beneath the comedy runs a cold streak that later writers, including Fitzgerald and Hemingway, admired and borrowed from. The collection is a fine introduction to one of the sharpest satirists of early twentieth-century America. Free to read as a PDF or EPUB edition.