SOURCE: "The Peak Years: The Love Nest and Round Up," in Ring Lardner, Twayne Publishers, 1963, pp. 98-120.

In the following essay, Patrick surveys Lardner's stories from 1925 to 1929, noting his switch in narrative technique from first to third person.

After slackening his production of short stories in the early 1920's and even passing through an idle period in 1923 and 1924 when he wrote none at all, Lardner resumed writing them in 1925 with fresh energy and a new seriousness. Within the twelve months from March, 1925, to March, 1926, he published nine, all of which soon reappeared in Love Nest (1926), a collection of far better overall quality than How to Write Short Stories, During the next three years, he published twenty-one more, sixteen of which he included in Round Up (1929), together with the nineteen he had already reprinted in his two earlier collections. From 1925 to 1929, he published thirty new stories, or an average...