Ringgold William “Ring” Lardner (March 6, 1885 – September 25, 1933) was a sports columnist, playwright, and short story writer who enjoyed poking fun at revered institutions such as marriage, theater, and sports. His works were admired by his contemporaries, such as renowned authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and J.D. Salinger.
He was elected to The Lambs in 1920 as a Professional member.
Quotes by Lardner are legendary:
“Are you lost, Daddy?” I asked tenderly. “Shut up,” he explained.”
“They gave each other a smile with a future in it.”
Born in Niles, Michigan, the youngest of nine children in a wealthy family, Lardner knew he wanted to be a newspaperman early on. As a teenager, he began work at the South Bend Tribune, before moving to Chicago where in 1913, he published a syndicated column in the Chicago Tribune, titled “In the Wake of the News.” It was carried by over 100 newspapers, stories ranging from sports to World War I dispatches, and the 1920 Democratic Convention.
In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, a collection of fictional letters by a bush-league baseball player, loaded with satire about athletics’ propensity for stupidity and greed. Some of the letters were published as short stories in The Saturday Evening Post the same year. It would be the first of dozens of collections of his work.
Lardner’s love for writing about the game faded after the “Black Sox Scandal” when the Chicago White Sox sold out the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Lose with a Smile (1933) was his last published collection of fictional baseball writings.
In addition to sports, Lardner admired the theater, and co-wrote a three-act play which made it to Broadway, called Elmer The Great (1928), with the fellow Lamb George M. Cohan.
June Moon (1929), a musical comedy cowritten with hit-maker George S. Kaufman, also a Lamb, was an extraordinary success, both on Broadway and for an extended national tour. A satire of the songwriting business and Tin Pan Alley, the play was loosely based on Lardner’s popular short story, “Some Like Them Cold.”
Lardner inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic character, Abe North in his most famous and final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). They were neighbors in Great Neck, Long Island; friends, loved jazz, and shared the same book editor, Maxwell Perkins, who introduced Lardner to the young, admiring Ernest Hemingway.
Lardner’s cultural impact continues, with J.D. Salinger’s reference to Lardner in two of his works, including The Catcher in the Rye, in which Holden Caulfield says, “My favorite author is my brother D.B. and my next favorite is Ring Lardner.”
Lardner died of tuberculosis on September 25, 1933 in East Hampton, New York.