The lost journalism of Ring Lardner / Ring Lardner ; edited by Ron Rapoport ; foreword by James Lardner.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Ring Lardner's influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country's best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner's trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day.

Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner's journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era--from Jack Dempsey's fights to the World Series and even an America's Cup--he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life.

The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner reintroduces this journalistic giant and his work and shows Lardner to be the rarest of writers: a spot-on chronicler of his time and place who remains contemporary to subsequent generations.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Newspaper pieces from the most famous journalist of the 1920s.Ring Lardner (1885-1933), well-known for his much-anthologized short story Haircut, was a prolific journalist whose work was carried by 150 newspapers across the country as well as by prominent magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Colliers. Between 1913 and 1919, he wrote more than 1,600 columns for the Chicago Tribune and between 1919 and 1927, produced more than 500 syndicated pieces. Throughout his career, he covered a wide range of topics, including political commentary, social satire, and, most especially, sports. Despite this output, his journalism has appeared in only two collections, an oversight that Rapoport (editor: From Black Sox to Three-Peats: A Century of Chicagos Best Sportswriting, 2013, etc.), a former Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News sports columnist, aims to correct with this abundant compendium. Although he provides introductions to each of the sections and helpful endnotes, much of what occupied Lardner is completely out of date for contemporary readers. There are sections on baseball, football, boxing, the Americas Cup, golf, and horse racing, all of which refer to ephemeral events long past. Of possible historical interest are Lardners views about Prohibition, World War I (in which he did not serve) and the contentious peace talks that followed, and various political conventions and elections. He made fun of the growing interest in radio, until he got one for his family; and of suburban life in general. Unfortunately, his characteristic lowbrow stylephonetic spelling and bad grammaris likely to elicit winces. Cynical and irreverent, his pieces on politicians (he calls them simps,) are sometimes-amusing, but less so are his opinions about women (girls will be girls, he remarks in a piece about his wifes desire to redo the decor of their house) and marriage (Why Not a Husbands Union? is the title of one piece). The editor could well have left out Lardners doggerel poetry. A commemoration of a writer who wryly observed his generation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.