Ring Lardner was one of the most admired American writers of the 1920s--praised by Virginia Woolf in 1925 as the author of "the best prose that has come our way" from America; compared favorably to Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Anton Chekhov, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and William Shakespeare; saluted by Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, Carl Van Doren, Stuart Sherman, Gilbert Seldes, and other major critics of the day as an original and vital voice in American letters. He was proclaimed a master of the modern short story, a writer of the finest vernacular American English since Twain, a satirist unmatched in an age preoccupied with social satire. His death at the age of forty-eight in 1933 brought moving tributes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Heywood Broun, and other eminent contemporaries. Writers as diverse as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, S. J. Perelman, J. D. Salinger, Mark Harris, and...