This early work by Ring Lardner was originally published in 1918 and we
are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. Ring Lardner was
born in Niles, Michigan in 1885. He studied engineering at the Armour
Institute of Technology in Chicago, but did not complete his first
semester. In 1907, Lardner obtained his first job as journalist with the
South Bend Times. Six years later, he published his first successful
book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters
by 'Jack Keefe', a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. A
huge hit, the book earned the appreciation of Virginia Woolf and others.
Lardner went on to write such well-known short stories as 'Haircut',
'Some Like Them Cold', 'The Golden Honeymoon', 'Alibi Ike', and 'A Day
with Conrad Green'.