Being the son of a famous man is never easy. Since John Lardner was a humorist who wrote principally (though by no means exclusively) about sports, comparisons between him and his father, Ring Lardner, would be inevitable. Not the least of John Lardner's accomplishments was the way he established himself as a much-admired writer in his own way, not as one of the legion of Ring Lardner imitators but rather, as Grantland Rice says in The Tumult and the Shouting (1954), as "one of our finer writers, a worthy son of a brilliant father." When John Lardner died, A. J. Liebling wrote, in an unsigned New Yorker tribute, "John grew up in the shadow of a father who was a great writer. This is a handicap shared by only an infestimal portion of any generation, but it did not intimidate him. He made his own way."

When John Abbott...