Ring Lardner

If Ring Lardner had been a baseball player, he would have been a switch hitter. Instead, he was a sportswriter, storyteller, song lyricist, and playwright who ricocheted between genres while maintaining a steely sense of humor and unwavering realism. Having worked as a Chicago sportswriter during the famous Black Sox scandal, Lardner knew better than to put baseball players on a pedestal as so many in his day did. His clear-eyed reporting and holistic view of athletes as real people with flawed personalities paved the way for today's ubiquitous coverage of star althetes. Though he never approached the fame of his close friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lardner was able to provide screamingly funny and pointed portraits of everyday pettiness, frivolity, and sheer idiocy, recreating the very voices of Americans with a keen sense of dialect. Whether writing dialogue into narratives or using vernacular in song lyrics, he knew the rhythms and voices of prize fighters, barbers, and town drunks just as well as those of the upper crust socialites. Lardner's satires and character sketches, while biting and on target, were always tempered by wit and a sense of respect for his subjects' exuberance of belief.