Description
He was an American original – a great journalist who made us laugh at ourselves. This affectionate, entertaining and authoritative biography offers a wholly new look at Ring Lardner’s too-short life and career.
Lardner may have been an aloof and distant man in some respects, but the story of his life is intensely human and intensely moving. For a while in the twenties he was the most famous writer in the country, with an annual income equivalent to a half million in today’s dollars. Then alcohol and illness began to erode his skills – yet he worked honourably and with distinction right up to his early death.
But that brief life was full and fascinating.
In Ring, Jonathan Yardley has brought together a vast amount of Lardner material, including excerpts from his writings that have never before been published in book form – many of them unread since their original publication and many of them marvelously funny. He restores baseball to its proper role in Lardner’s career, recognizing that the game was central to his development as a journalist and writer. He vividly evokes a vanished era: the turn-of-the-century small town, baseball when it was played by the likes of Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson, Jay Gatsby’s Long Island, Lardner’s legendary peers, among them Jack Dempsey, Maxwell Perkins, George S. Kaufman, Flo Ziegfeld, Ernest Hemingway and – n most detailed and revealing examination yet – the important and touching friendship between Lardner and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Quoting at length from recently discovered letters, Ring also re-creates the charming Edwardian courtship between Ring and his will Ellis more completely and engrossingly than ever before.
Thoroughly readable and entertaining, carefully researched but not at all academic, Ring is a wholly new look at the life and career of this uniquely American writer.
Hardcover, 405 pages. In very good pre-loved condition with the exception of being ex-library.