Ring Lardner

At the height of the Jazz Age, Ring Lardner was Americas most beloved humorist, equally admired by a popular audience and by literary friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. A sports writer who became a sensation with his comic baseball bestseller, "You Know Me Al," Lardner had a rare gift for inspired nonsense and an ear attuned to the rhythms and hilarious oddities of American speech. He was also a sharp and dispassionate observer of...

Ring Lardner's humor, quirky imagination, and ear for the American vernacular endeared him to such formidable critics as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, V.S. Pritchett, and Virginia Woolf. A newspaperman who began as a sports reporter and almost accidentally stumbled into short-story writing, Lardner meticulously captured the way Americans really speak. In You Know Me Al (1916), he created one of the most enduring characters in American fiction, the semi-literate...

An unscrupulous boxer fights his way to the top, but eventually alienates all of the people who helped him on the way up. Midge, played by Kirk Douglas, is not the basic good guy corrupted by the sweet science and led astray by evil mangers and promoters, his arrogance and stubbornness make him at once a villain and a hero.