SOURCE: "The Talent of Ring Lardner," in New Statesman, Vol. LVII, No. 1467, April 25, 1959, pp. 580-81.

In the following essay, Pritchett argues that Lardner's principal contribution to American prose is his welding together of the "stream of consciousness " and the "stream of garrulity."

What is the specifically American contribution to literature? In the Twenties, when Ring Lardner's How to Write Short Stories first appeared, with Hemingway and then a whole school, the answer was certain: talk. Mark Twain was not a lucky and accidental exploiter of the vernacular, a folk writer who represented the end of a way of life; he was one of the founders of a tradition that was going to last and be built on. The notorious, subversive garrulity has become literary capital. Even the dilatory, latinised, officious style of respectable American prose with its unrelenting and deliberate long-windedness, its love of ten words where one...