Humor Lardner, Ring: Lardner on the Loose Omnibus (collected short fiction).v1. 21 Feb 2017

[GrannyGrump]

Lardner on the Loose
A Collection of Short Fiction by Ringgold Wilmer Lardner (1885–1933)

First published 1914 ~ 1933.
The text of this book is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+80” or less.

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Ring Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings about sports, marriage, and the theatre. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom professed strong admiration for his writing.

In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters from “Jack Keefe”, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made much use of the fictional author’s idiosyncratic vernacular, with semi-literate grammar and phonetic spelling. Like most of Lardner’s stories, You Know Me Al employs satire, in this case to show the stupidity and avarice of a certain type of athlete. Until 1920, Lardner continued to write follow-up stories about Jack Keefe, some of which were collected in the books Treat ‘Em Rough and The Real Dope, narrating Jack’s Army experiences in World War I.

Lardner later published such stories as “Haircut”, “Some Like Them Cold”, “The Golden Honeymoon”, “Alibi Ike”, “A Day with Conrad Green”, and dozens more. Sometimes narrated by a “wise boob”, with slyly satirical commentary on manners and morals (The Big Town), sometimes taking a poignant view (“Now and Then”, “Old Folk’s Christmas”), sometimes sliding into sheer noir (“Champion”), always entertaining. His frequent use of vernacular influenced sports fiction writing for generations to come.
(—Extracted and adapted from Wikipedia.)

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This is my own compilation. Much of Lardner’s work after 1922 is not available in digital archives, so this collection is far from complete.

Text was obtained from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, the Library of Congress and the National Library of Australia.
Transcription and OCR errors were corrected; punctuation, italics, and diacritics formatted. Embedded fonts “Landsdowne” by Paul J. Lloyd and “Text Me One” by Julia Petretta used for titling.

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I was surprised to learn that none of Lardner's work had been uploaded here, so decided to fill the gap.

Do NOT try to read the two sections comprised of "Letters" straight through; you will wear yourself out deciphering phonetic spelling. Dip into those as snacks. Spelling and grammar in the other segments is mostly fairly normal. Sort of...

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