Jack Keefe's first letter begins: "Friend Al: Well Al old pal I suppose you seen in the paper where I been sold to the White Sox." The last letter, fourteen months later, ends, "You know me Al." The earliest English novels began with epistolary works such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747); Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett were quick to exploit the form's comic possibilities.

Lardner revives the device with an infusion of American vernacular humor. Jack Keefe writes the way he speaks, and Lardner has a fine ear for the way men like Jack speak. As a sportswriter, Lardner had travelled with the players; he wrote letters for some of them, and in one instance read menus aloud to an illiterate White Sox player. Jack Keefe gets his verbs and pronouns wrong ("the papers says," "you shouldn't ought to eats so much," "she...