Summarizing Lardner's impact, his first biographer, Donald Elder, wrote that "Ring's influence on American prose has been so pervasive that it is easily taken for granted." In addition to other writers' testimonials, one sees much of Lardner's "Haircut" in Eudora Welty's "Petrified Man," Lardner's "Hurry Kane" in Bernard Malamud's
The Natural (1952), Lardner's many stories of suburban pastimes in the later writings on the subject by John P. Marquand, John Cheever, and John Updike. Yet Lardner's reputation today is uncertain, his contribution to American literature a question, not a commonplace.
It is in these uncertainties themselves that one finds the key to Lardner's place in American letters. In the responses to Lardner's fiction since early in the 1920s one faces questions of vocation, audience, ambition, and form--the relationship of writer and reader in a democratic mass culture. Throughout his professional lifetime Lardner remained the working journalist, writing first for newspapers and then for the most popular magazines in order to support a large family in relative luxury.
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