Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T16:56:12.214Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al: Up from Popularity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Charles A. Kupfer
Get access

Extract

Ring Lardner's position in American literature suffers more from the praise he gains than the criticism he receives. His reputation as an acerbic journalist, mordant satirist, master dialectician, and popular sportswriter still draws clouds of suspicion across the minds of highbrow critics weighing his stature as a serious writer.

Lardner himself did nothing to debunk the notion that he was at heart a pulp author, never tearing away from his journalistic roots as did other authors who started their careers in the newspaper business. It may have been comfort with his preferred environment, or a reverse snobbery, but Lardner always disdained self-conscious artfulness, instead preening his image as a wordsmith and copy-slave. Max Perkins, his Scribner's editor, noted this self-defined lowbrow posture: “He always thought of himself as a newspaperman, anyhow. He had a sort of provincial scorn for literary people.”

Provincial scorn notwithstanding, Lardner was a prominent member of Perkins's stable. Contemporaries at Scribner's included Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Perkins, a literary talent scout with a knack for coaxing maximum output from mercurial writers, devoted ample time and attention to cultivating Lardner's work. Few writers of any stripe could boast more lustrous friends and colleagues, and, in his lifetime, Lardner's proper place in the American literary pantheon was accorded with scant complaint. It was only after his death in 1933 that the diminishing process began.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 30 , October 2005 , pp. 487 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Caruthers, Clifford, Ring Around Max (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1973), xxiGoogle Scholar.

2. Patrick, Walton R., Ring Lardner (New York: Twayne, 1963), 145Google Scholar.

3. Robertson, James O., American Myth, American Reality (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 256Google Scholar.

4. Lardner, John, introduction to You Know Me Al, by Ring Lardner (New York: Scribner's, 1960), 13Google Scholar.

5. Friedrich, Otto, Ring Lardner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965), 21Google Scholar.

6. Ibid.

7. Yardley, Jonathan, Ring (New York: Atheneum, 1984), 200Google Scholar.

8. Lardner, Ring, You Know Me Al (New York: Vintage, 1984), 127Google Scholar.

9. Lardner, John, introduction, 8Google Scholar.

10. Friedrich, , Ring Lardner, 23Google Scholar.

11. Patrick, , Ring Lardner, 24Google Scholar.

12. Berryman, John, “The Case of Ring Lardner,” Commentary 22 (11 1956): 422Google Scholar.

13. Herskowitz, Mickey, Letters from Lefty (Houston: Inverness, 1980), 13Google Scholar.

14. Berryman, , “Case,” 417Google Scholar.

15. Fitzgerald, F. Scott, “Ring,” New Republic, 76 (10 11, 1933): 254Google Scholar.

16. Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens (New York: Roy, 1950), 10Google Scholar.

17. Evans, Elizabeth, Ring Lardner (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), 74Google Scholar.

18. Asinof, Eliot, Eight Men Out (New York: Owl, 1987), 93Google Scholar.

19. Fadiman, Clifton, “Ring Lardner and the Triangle of Hate,” Nation 134 (02 22, 1933): 315Google Scholar.

20. Mencken, H. L., “A Humorist Shows His Teeth,” American Mercury, 06 1926, 245–55Google Scholar.

21. Webb, Howard A. Jr, “The Meaning of Ring Lardner's Fiction: A Re-evaluation,” American Literature 61 (01 1960): 436Google Scholar.

22. Lardner, Ring, You Know Me Al, 168–69Google Scholar.

23. Friedrich, , Ring Lardner, 13Google Scholar.

24. Van Doren, Carl, “Beyond Grammar: Ring W. Lardner — Philologist Among the Lowbrows,” Century 106 (07 1923): 471Google Scholar.

25. Mencken, H. L., The American Language (New York: Knopf, 1936), 424–25Google Scholar.

26. Kissack, Gardner, “Recommended: Ring Lardner,” English Journal 3 (01 1985): 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Friedrich, , Ring Lardner, 44Google Scholar.

28. Matthews, T. S., “Lardner, Shakespeare, and Chekhov,” New Republic, 05 22, 1929, 36Google Scholar.

29. Caruthers, , Ring Around Max, 126Google Scholar.

30. DeMuth, James, Small Town Chicago: The Comic Perspectives of Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, and Ring Lardner (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1980), 19Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., 75.

32. Hilfer, Anthony C., Revolt from the Village: 1915–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 3Google Scholar.

33. Sklar, Robert, The Plastic Age, 1917–1930 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 117Google Scholar.

34. Herron, Ima H., The Small Town in American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1939), 338Google Scholar.

35. Hasley, Louis, “Ring Lardner: The Ashes of Idealism,” Arizona Quarterly 26 (Autumn 1970): 230Google Scholar.

36. Herron, , Small Town, 341Google Scholar.

37. Hoffman, Frederick J., The Twenties (New York: Viking, 1955), 327Google Scholar.

38. Giamatti, A. Bartlett, Take Time for Paradise (New York: Summit, 1989), 95Google Scholar.