SOURCE: "Ring Lardner's Dual Audience and the Capitalist Double Bind," in American Literary History, Vol. IV, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 264-87.

In the following essay, Robinson traces the scholarship on Lardner and analyzes it in terms of "shifting class polarities."

[Lardner's vernacular humor] appeals to two types of mind that are at opposite extremes. Lardner is read with delight by people who talk in the very way that he writes, and by highly educated people who find relief and amusement in a lack of education in others. (Graham 508)

The mere fact that Lardner's stories have been collected into books is a sign that he has been taken up by the highbrows. For he wrote originally for people who do not read books. (Matthews 36)

That a newspaper humorist, a comic-strip designer, a baseball writer, should rise to the heights of art and do it without turning a cold shoulder to...