SOURCE: "Ring," in The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books, 1920-1970, edited by Gilbert A. Harrison, Liveright Publishing, 1972, pp. 131-37.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1933, Fitzgerald eulogizes Lardner, lamenting the fact that Lardner expressed so little of what he felt so deeply.

For a year and a half, the writer of this appreciation was Ring Lardner's most familiar companion; after that geography made separations and our contacts were rare. When my wife and I last saw him in 1931 he looked already like a man on his deathbed—it was terribly sad to see that six feet three inches of kindness stretched out ineffectual in the hospital room. His fingers trembled with a match, the tight skin on his handsome skull was marked as a mask of misery and nervous pain.

He gave a very different impression when we first saw him in 1921—he seemed...