SOURCE: "Ring Lardner: Reluctant Artist," in A Question of Quality: Popularity and Value in Modern Creative Writing, edited by Louis Filler, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976, pp. 26-39.

In the essay below, Holmes evaluates Lardner's career and short fiction against earlier criticism, concluding that Lardner was "a realist, an ironist, and a satirist" who created both "a comic and distressing image of the American common man."

Lardner is a striking example of the writer as both popular entertainer and genuine artist. He was first, last, and always a journalist. He started out as a sports writer and columnist in Chicago, and after the success of "A Bustler's Letters Home" in The Saturday Evening Post, in 1914, the bulk of his writing appeared in the big slick mass-circulation magazines—the Post, Collier's, The American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Redbook. His syndicated newspaper column brought his iconoclastic wit and comically low-brow idiom to...