Ring Lardner

Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan, in 1885. He began his career as a sportswriter, gaining fame for his fictional "Jack Keefe" stories, collected in You Know Me Al (1916), which used a baseball player's letters to expose vanity and ignorance through flawless dialect. Lardner expanded into short fiction, plays, and journalism, publishing collections like How to Write Short Stories (1924) and the war satire My Four Weeks in France (1918). His later work grew darker, critiquing American middle-class life in stories such as "The Haircut." Though often pigeonholed as a humorist, Lardner's precise ear for language and unflinching realism influenced later writers like Ernest Hemingway and James Thurber. He died in 1933, leaving a legacy as a sharp observer of American speech and character.