Ring Lardner began his writing career as a newspaperman, first covering routine assignments for a local paper in South Bend, Indiana, then moving to Chicago where he was a sports reporter specializing in baseball; in many ways, his work always showed the pressure of newspaper deadlines and the lesson a successful baseball reporter learns--to be entertaining when the game gets dull. As important as his newspaper writing was (he wrote the prestigious column "In the Wake of the News" for the Chicago Tribune (1913-1919) and later a "Weekly Letter" (1919-1927) for the Bell Syndicate, which had readers from Niles, Michigan, to Yokohama, Japan), his significance as an American writer began on 7 March 1914 when the Saturday Evening Post published the first-person narrative of a semiliterate braggart baseball pitcher named Jack Keefe. The story was "A Busher's Letters Home." A total of six busher stories appeared in the Post that...