Biography Essay

Ring Lardner began his writing career as a newspaperman, first covering routine assignments for a local paper in South Bend, Indiana, then moving to Chicago where he was a sports reporter specializing in baseball. In many ways, his work always showed the pressure of newspaper deadlines and the lesson a successful baseball reporter learns—to be entertaining when the game gets dull. As important as his newspaper writing was (he wrote the prestigious column "In the Wake of the News" for the Chicago Tribune, 1913-1919, and later a "Weekly Letter," 1919- 1927, for the Bell Syndicate, which had readers from Niles, Michigan, to Yokohama, Japan), his significance as an American writer began on 7 March 1914 when the Saturday Evening Post published the first-person narrative of a semiliterate braggart baseball pitcher named Jack Keefe. The story was "A Busher's Letters Home." A total of six busher stories appeared...