SOURCE: "Harpies and Gold Diggers," in Ring Lardner, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1979, pp. 51-72.

In the following essay, Evans details Lardner's misogynist depiction of female characters.

Jonathan Yardley has suggested that Lardner "tended to divide women into two separate and absolutely hostile camps." On the one hand were "harpies, gold diggers, and two-timers typified by the women he had seen hanging around ballplayers; these were women who had somehow betrayed their sex because they were just as coarse as the men in their lives, and frequently more clever." Opposite these were women "who remained faithful to his pre-Jazz Age sense of femininity but who also had wit, humor, ebullience and style" and in this group were diverse women he admired—Zelda Fitzgerald, Kate Rice, Dorothy Parker, Claudette Colbert, his sister Anna, his wife Ellis, his mother Lena.

Examples from the first camp exist in Lardner's fiction, but women...