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Ring
Sportswriter, storyteller, humorist―Ring Lardner was an American original, and in this affectionate, entertaining, and authoritative biography, Pulitzer Prize winning critic Jonathan Yardley gives us a new look at Lardner's all too short life and career.
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
30 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Yardley
18 books12 followersJonathan Yardley is a book critic, journalist, and biographer, and the recipient of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
From 1981 to 2014, he was chief book critic for the Washington Post, where he combined scathingly frank reviews with an appreciation for new talent. He championed the early careers of Michael Chabon, Edward P. Jones, and Anne Tyler, among others.
In addition to biographies of Ring Lardner and Frederick Exley, Yardley published Our Kind of People: The Story of an American Family , a wry memoir about his WASP parents. Second Reading , his most recent book, collects the series of Post columns in which he reconsidered notable or neglected books from the past.
From 1981 to 2014, he was chief book critic for the Washington Post, where he combined scathingly frank reviews with an appreciation for new talent. He championed the early careers of Michael Chabon, Edward P. Jones, and Anne Tyler, among others.
In addition to biographies of Ring Lardner and Frederick Exley, Yardley published Our Kind of People: The Story of an American Family , a wry memoir about his WASP parents. Second Reading , his most recent book, collects the series of Post columns in which he reconsidered notable or neglected books from the past.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 11, 2015
I mean it was an interesting read about a funny, irreverent and brilliant writer, but all in all it was kind of boring and felt too long a read. Cool anecdotes of his baseball writing in the 1910s as well as times spent with F. Scott Fitzgerald. But mostly boring.
May 3, 2020
A "3" mainly because I mistakenly thought that the bulk of Lardner's life was as a sportswriter. It's certainly at least a "4" for any big Lardner fan. I found Yardley a bit didactic here and there, but otherwise he brought much wisdom to the biography and had some beautiful thoughts about Lardner the man -- Yardley clearly a huge fan himself. I had no idea Lardner was a large influence on Hemingway, and that Virginia Woolf highly lauded his contribution to American literature...
January 29, 2022
Terribly sentimental, and it sidesteps all of the serious questions about Lardner's alcoholism, which was extreme even by the standards of his time. As far as the writing goes, Yardley gives Lardner a whole lot of credit for a very modest achievement. In the words of Ernest Hemingway, "imitated Ring Lardner as a kid but didn't learn from him. Didn't learn from him because he doesn't know anything. All he's got is a good fake ear and he's been around."
November 8, 2016
I'd had Jonathan Yardley's Ring Lardner biography sitting on my shelf for some time -- long enough that I hadn't the slightest idea where I bought it. Powell's old Lincoln Avenue store in Chicago? Oxford Too in Atlanta? The Strand?
I bring up the provenance because, had I known what a slog "Ring" would be, I would have just left it where I saw it.
It's a shame, really. Few remember Lardner these days; his son, the two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter (and Hollywood Ten member) Ring Lardner Jr., is better known. I first ran across Ring Sr. in baseball books, where authors would talk about his baseball-themed short stories -- such as "You Know Me Al" -- with a sense of awe. He was one of the leading -- and best-paid -- authors of the 1920s, good friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, pen pal to Maxwell Perkins, friend to the Algonquin Round Table and resident of tony Great Neck, N.Y.
He was also a character in the Black Sox saga, sitting in the press box and making note of questionable plays. In the film "Eight Men Out," he's played by John Sayles, who's a dead ringer for the writer. (Pardon the pun.)
So I was expecting to find something boisterous, charming and a little sour, perhaps a character somewhere between Mark Twain and Will Rogers, in Yardley's biography. Instead, what I got was a rather dull fellow whose writing, particularly the dialect-flavored pieces with deliberate misspellings, is at best a time capsule of early-20th century America. It hasn't aged well.
It doesn't help that Yardley, formerly the longtime lead book critic of the Washington Post, doesn't really get inside Lardner's head. The man was apparently a formidable drinker, something Yardley mentions frequently but doesn't really try to explain. He was also a beloved father and husband, but again, there's little warmth that comes off the pages. Even Lardner's early days, before he married and became one of the leading voices of the '20s, come across as kind of rote. (And there are all of two paragraphs on the 1919 World Series, an event that really shook Lardner; Eliot Asinof was far kinder to him in the book "Eight Men Out.")
Equally sadly, Yardley's frequent breaks for Lardner clips simply slow down the narrative. The whimsical verse and nonsense plays just don't resonate today; you can see why Lardner, for all of his fame decades ago, has been relegated to the realm of minor author. (I can't speak to his short stories, including "Haircut" and "The Golden Honeymoon." They're available online, but I haven't felt the need to seek them out.)
Still, I think Lardner would be a more engaging subject in the hands of a different biographer. It's ironic, since Yardley once won the Pulitzer for his criticism and was known for both making some careers and driving a stake through others, that he suffers from such restraint. Lardner may not have had Twain's colorful life, but surely someone like Ron Powers (who wrote an amazing Twain biography a decade ago) could have placed him in context of his exciting times.
I'm giving the book three stars because it's not really a one- or two-star book, which in my thinking is either poorly written or frustratingly offensive. "Ring" is neither, but the third star is granted grudgingly. "Ring" really belongs on a used bookstore's shelves, where it can look thoughtful and a touch erudite. And perhaps it's best if it stays there.
I bring up the provenance because, had I known what a slog "Ring" would be, I would have just left it where I saw it.
It's a shame, really. Few remember Lardner these days; his son, the two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter (and Hollywood Ten member) Ring Lardner Jr., is better known. I first ran across Ring Sr. in baseball books, where authors would talk about his baseball-themed short stories -- such as "You Know Me Al" -- with a sense of awe. He was one of the leading -- and best-paid -- authors of the 1920s, good friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, pen pal to Maxwell Perkins, friend to the Algonquin Round Table and resident of tony Great Neck, N.Y.
He was also a character in the Black Sox saga, sitting in the press box and making note of questionable plays. In the film "Eight Men Out," he's played by John Sayles, who's a dead ringer for the writer. (Pardon the pun.)
So I was expecting to find something boisterous, charming and a little sour, perhaps a character somewhere between Mark Twain and Will Rogers, in Yardley's biography. Instead, what I got was a rather dull fellow whose writing, particularly the dialect-flavored pieces with deliberate misspellings, is at best a time capsule of early-20th century America. It hasn't aged well.
It doesn't help that Yardley, formerly the longtime lead book critic of the Washington Post, doesn't really get inside Lardner's head. The man was apparently a formidable drinker, something Yardley mentions frequently but doesn't really try to explain. He was also a beloved father and husband, but again, there's little warmth that comes off the pages. Even Lardner's early days, before he married and became one of the leading voices of the '20s, come across as kind of rote. (And there are all of two paragraphs on the 1919 World Series, an event that really shook Lardner; Eliot Asinof was far kinder to him in the book "Eight Men Out.")
Equally sadly, Yardley's frequent breaks for Lardner clips simply slow down the narrative. The whimsical verse and nonsense plays just don't resonate today; you can see why Lardner, for all of his fame decades ago, has been relegated to the realm of minor author. (I can't speak to his short stories, including "Haircut" and "The Golden Honeymoon." They're available online, but I haven't felt the need to seek them out.)
Still, I think Lardner would be a more engaging subject in the hands of a different biographer. It's ironic, since Yardley once won the Pulitzer for his criticism and was known for both making some careers and driving a stake through others, that he suffers from such restraint. Lardner may not have had Twain's colorful life, but surely someone like Ron Powers (who wrote an amazing Twain biography a decade ago) could have placed him in context of his exciting times.
I'm giving the book three stars because it's not really a one- or two-star book, which in my thinking is either poorly written or frustratingly offensive. "Ring" is neither, but the third star is granted grudgingly. "Ring" really belongs on a used bookstore's shelves, where it can look thoughtful and a touch erudite. And perhaps it's best if it stays there.
August 2, 2015
I’m not sure that folks read much by Ring Lardner these days outside of a handful of anthologized short stories. In his biography of Lardner, Jonathan Yardley makes a case for why that’s so (produced no novel, known for syndicated columns and a comic strip, baseball connection) and why that’s a shame (innovative short stories, brilliant ear for American spoken language, unique background as a sports reporter). Lardner was a popular humorist of the 1910’s and 20’s, and maybe those two words “popular humorist” summarize why he was never elevated to the literary level of his contemporaries Fitzgerald (a friend), Hemingway, etc. Yardley’s 1977 biography has stood the test of time; it’s well researched and authoritatively written. Yardley weeds through the output of Lardner’s sports and humor columns as well as the short stories to give readers the best of Lardner and avoid those passages that have not aged well. I’m not sure that anyone has succeeded in capturing the American vernacular as well since Lardner or had as much fun with the epistolary format, though Mark Harris comes to mind with “The Southpaw” and “Wake Up, Stupid.” Lardner died at 48 of TB, but his life was greatly curtailed by his alcoholism. He lived in a time with limited treatment choices and no AA support; one of the sad discoveries that Yardley found was that Lardner had naively assumed that the institution of Prohibition would force him to quit the habit once and for all. For an update on Yardley’s take on Lardner, see his introduction to the 1997 “Ring Lardner: Selected Stories.” Nonetheless, there's much to enjoy in "Ring": "'One of Mr. Ruth's boyhood pals in Baltimore was Henry L. Mencken; they used to take long walks in the woods together, looking for odd Flora. It was an ideal companionship, for both loved to talk and as neither one could understand the other, no law of ethics was broken by their talking simultaneously. I would repeat some of their conversations, but Mencken's words can't be spelled and the Babe's can't be printed.'" Recommended.
October 15, 2013
Not only was I taught a great deal about American history, culture and literature by this biography but I was moved by the story and personalities of Ring Lardner, his wife Ellis and his four sons, two of which lost their lives to war. Lardner,because of alcoholism, never lived to be fifty but produced a vast amount of journalism, humor and short fiction. Yardley makes a good case that much of his work has and will continue to stand the test of time not only because of his significant influence on younger writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway but also because of its intrinsic merit.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews