SOURCE: "Ring Lardner," in Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays, Random House, 1977, pp. 59-63.

In the following essay, Hardwick observes that Lardner's characters are unexpectedly mean and desperate during a time when the country is booming and other authors are writing about the "Roaring Twenties. "

When Ring Lardner died in 1933, Scott Fitzgerald wrote an interesting and somewhat despairing tribute to him. "The point of these paragraphs is that, whatever Ring's achievement was, it fell short of the achievement he was capable of, and this because of a cynical attitude toward his work." Fitzgerald thought Lardner had developed the habit of silence about important things and that he fell back in his writing on the formulas he always had ready at hand. It is easy to imagine how this might have appeared true thirty years ago when the memory of the great short story writer working away at his...