Ring Lardner Summary

Biography EssayRing Lardner began his writing career as a newspaperman, first covering routine assignments for a local paper in South Bend, Indiana, then moving to Chicago where he was a sports report... Read more

Ring Lardner began his writing career as a newspaperman, first covering routine assignments for a local paper in South Bend, Indiana, then moving to Chicago where he was a sports reporter specializing... Read more

Ring Lardner was one of the most admired American writers of the 1920s--praised by Virginia Woolf in 1925 as the author of "the best prose that has come our way" from America; compared favorably to Ma... Read more

In the following review of How to Write Short Stories, Mencken claims that no contemporary American writes better, though he doubts Lardner's work will stand the test of time. Some time ago a y... Read more

In the following excerpt, Friedrich discusses Lardner's sports stories and notes how Lardner's prose changed the style and candor of sports journalism. Nevins Surveys Lardner's St... Read more

In the following essay, Spatz surveys Lardner's short fiction, placing the major stories in the literary tradition of despair that had begun in the early 1920s with T. S. Eliot's "... Read more

In the following excerpt, Yardley claims that although Lardner's prose style had a major affect on American journalism and fiction, critics have neglected—not rejected—the bulk of... Read more

In the following essay, Bordewyk traces four types of communication failures in Lardner's fiction, each of which leads to a sense of alienation among his characters. Mark Twain once said that &... Read more

In the following essay, Gilead investigates abusive language in Lardner's stories, noting its effects on both the narrator and reader. Influenced by Michel Foucault's investigations of t... Read more

In the following essay, Blythe and Sweet revise the standard interpretation of the barber-narrator as senseless in "Haircut," perhaps Lardner's most famous story, suggesting he is... Read more

In the following essay, Payne describes how the protagonist of "The Love Nest" violently manipulates language to impose his will Ring Lardner criticism has come a long way since Clifton ... Read more

In the following excerpt, Cowlishaw counters the argument that readers are helpless to battle the effects of Lardner's "authorial manipulation." Readers' responses to Ring ... Read more

In the following review of Lose with A Smile, Mencken argues that critics ignore Lardner because of his attack on idealism and sentimentality. Writing in this place in July, 1924, I permitted myself t... Read more

In the essay that follows, Farrell evaluates Lardner's characters in Round Up, finding that "they are among the most banal characters in all of modern American fiction. " Yet thes... Read more

In the essay below, Webb asserts that the "dominant theme in Ring Lardner's writing was not the pettiness and meanness of modern life; it was the problem of communication." Our ju... Read more