SOURCE: "Man As Thing: Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al," in South Dakota Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 114-22.

In the following essay, Hart argues that in You Know Me Al Lardner lampoons the "twentieth-century American," who is both egotistical and conformist.

When You Know Me Al appeared in book form in 1916, Ring Lardner was already a veteran sports writer. Beginning in 1905 at the Times in South Bend, he had worked for two years as the "sporting editor." For five years in Chicago, he had reported major-league baseball for the Inter-Ocean, the Examiner, and the Tribune before taking on the sports column in the Tribune in 1913. His first fiction, which appeared in 1914, had a baseball setting. Indeed, Lardner had known baseball all his life. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1933 that "during those years, when most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school...