SOURCE: "Epilogue," in Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner, Random House, 1977, pp. 385-93.

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 his work.

By the time of his death Ring's books had to all intents and purposes stopped selling; in the last three years of his life Scribner's was able to pay him the sorry total of $1,019.83 in royalties. But in the years that followed, his popularity and reputation grew rather than shrank. He has never had a revival such as that Scott Fitzgerald began to enjoy after the publication in 1951 of Arthur Mizener's biography, The Far Side of Paradise; it is most unlikely that as a writer of short fiction, nonsense and satire, he ever will. But he has never vanished, either, as have many other popular...