Rats drove Ring Lardner into journalism.

As he told the story, he was working as a meter reader for a gas company in his hometown of Niles, Michigan, but too often he found "a rat reading the meter ahead of me." At one point, the editor of the South Bend Times came to the gas company office to try to hire Lardner's brother, Rex, a reporter for the Niles Daily Sun. Lardner volunteered that he often helped Rex with his work; that was an untruth, but as he later said, "I was thinking of those rats."

The year was 1905, and Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was twenty. In taking a job with the Times he embarked on a journalistic career which, though relatively short, would win him a place as one of America's outstanding journalist-humorists. Over the next twenty-eight years Lardner would find in the social pretensions of the lower...