Ring Lardner Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was born on March 6, 1885, in Niles, Michigan. Raised in a small Midwestern town during a period when baseball was becoming a national passion and newspapers were the dominant daily medium, he discovered early both the rhythms of American speech and the rituals of the ballpark. His schooling was conventional, but his ambitions were not. He tried college briefly, then gravitated to newsrooms, which supplied the apprenticeship in observation, timing, and tone that would define his work. The world he inhabited from the beginning was not that of a stage comedian but of a listener with an acute ear for how people actually talked.

Entry into Journalism
Lardner began as a local reporter and soon embraced sports writing, a discipline that allowed wit and skepticism to live alongside box scores. He learned to file quickly, to travel with teams, and to treat the clubhouse as material rather than shrine. After early newspaper jobs in the Midwest, he joined the Chicago Tribune. There he inherited "In the Wake of the News", the city's signature sports column created by Hugh E. Keough. Lardner enlarged the column's possibilities, turning game accounts into miniature comedies of manners and dispatches from ballparks into portraits of American character. His peers included Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon, yet Lardner's voice was distinct: skeptical without cruelty, amused yet quietly moral.

Sportswriting and a New American Voice
Lardner's sports pieces were never merely about results. He focused on talk, locker room chatter, boosterism, the salesmanship of owners, the hopes of fans, and he reproduced voices on the page through intentional misspellings and malapropisms that suggested cadence and class without condescension. He understood that a pitcher erring on the mound and a clerk erring in grammar could be the same person under different pressures. Through these columns, he sharpened the method that would make his fiction famous: letting characters damn or redeem themselves through the words they chose.

Fiction and Satire
Fame beyond sports arrived with You Know Me Al, the epistolary series in The Saturday Evening Post that introduced Jack Keefe, a brash minor-league pitcher whose letters home expose his vanity, insecurity, and charm. Readers laughed at Keefe's misspellings and logic yet recognized the pathos in his innocence. Lardner extended his range with short stories such as Haircut, The Golden Honeymoon, Alibi Ike, and Champion. In these works, humor became a diagnostic tool. A barber's monologue in Haircut reveals a small town's casual cruelties; an elderly couple's Florida trip in The Golden Honeymoon charts marriage's habits and fragile pride. Even when writing about sport, as in Alibi Ike or Champion, Lardner probed self-deception, ambition, and the ways games refract character.

Theater and Collaborations
Lardner's feel for dialogue led naturally to the stage. He collaborated with George S. Kaufman on June Moon, a backstage comedy about Tin Pan Alley's promises and humiliations, and he worked with George M. Cohan on Elmer the Great, drawn from his baseball material. In theater he honed a more economical, performable line without abandoning the mordant observation of his fiction. These collaborations placed him among New York's leading dramatists and humorists, even as he kept one eye on the ballfield and another on the human foibles that made both newspaper and Broadway audiences lean forward.

Circles, Friendships, and Influence
In the 1920s Lardner moved east and settled for a time in Great Neck on Long Island, a suburban boomtown of wealth and spectacle. There he crossed paths with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who admired Lardner's precision and defended him as one of the great American writers. Fitzgerald's praise helped introduce Lardner to literary readers who rarely opened the sports page. Lardner also knew figures from journalism and theater, among them Kaufman and Cohan, and he was read attentively by writers who would shape magazine humor, including contributors to The New Yorker. Though he was never an after-dinner comedian, his comic intelligence guided others who were; he showed how a straight-faced narrator could carry a joke farther than a punch line, and how the vernacular could bear the weight of art.

Style and Themes
Lardner wrote in a flattened, American idiom that concealed exacting craft. He let narrators implicate themselves, trusted readers to hear what was left unsaid, and prized the truant detail, a misused word, a score misremembered, a boast too often repeated, that reveals a life. His satire was rarely topical. It targeted a deeper, recurring set of habits: the alibi, the easy lie, the cheerful cover for greed, the self-delusion that keeps a hero from seeing his own reflection. This method influenced later stylists who favored first-person monologues and the understated reveal. The clarity of his sentences and the accuracy of his ear made him a model for journalists and fiction writers alike.

Personal Life
In 1911 he married Ellis Abbott. They had four sons, John, James, Ring Jr., and David, each of whom became a writer. Family life exposed another dimension of Lardner's craft: parodies of household guidance, spoofs of domestic instruction, and playful songs designed for intimate audiences before they reached print. The household was literary yet practical; copy deadlines and dinner times had to coexist. Later, the careers of his sons, John as a noted sports and war correspondent, James as a journalist who died in the Spanish Civil War, Ring Lardner Jr. as a screenwriter who famously confronted blacklisting before returning to win an Academy Award, and David as a New Yorker writer who died during World War II, extended the family's presence in American letters.

Disillusionment and Discipline
The 1919 baseball scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to fix the World Series, intensified Lardner's skepticism about professional sport. He had celebrated the game's quirks and characters; now he saw more clearly the systems of money and betrayal under the surface. His tone sharpened, but his discipline never failed. He continued to meet deadlines, to revise his stories meticulously, and to entertain readers who might disagree with his conclusions yet trusted his honesty.

Later Years and Health
By the late 1920s Lardner's health was in decline. Chronic illness and the toll of long newspaper years reduced his output while deepening his melancholy. He moved from Great Neck to East Hampton, seeking rest and a steadier life. Even then he wrote memorably, producing late stories and theatrical work while corresponding with friends like Fitzgerald, who worried over him and continued to champion his talent. Lardner died on September 25, 1933, in East Hampton, New York, after years of illness. He was forty-eight.

Legacy
Ring Lardner's reputation rests on a small shelf of indelible stories, a handful of plays, and a body of sportswriting that reshaped how Americans read about games. He proved that the comic monologue could carry serious meaning, that mangled grammar could be eloquent, and that the dugout and the parlor offered equally rich arenas for literature. Editors and writers who came after him, among them John O'Hara and James Thurber, acknowledged their debt. Filmmakers adapted his stories; readers still meet Jack Keefe with a smile that widens into recognition. If he began as a sportswriter, he finished as something larger: a master of the American voice, who held up a mirror to the country's enthusiasms and evasions and made them, in the best sense, unforgettable.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Ring, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Writing - Sports - Sarcastic - Family.

Other people realated to Ring: Franklin P. Adams (Journalist), Bugs Baer (Journalist), Zelda Fitzgerald (Writer), Grantland Rice (Journalist), John Lithgow (Actor)