Round Up: The Stories of Ring Lardner (The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature)

569 pp. 8vo. Original brown full leather, gilt titles and decorations, all edges gilt, silk moire endpapers, ribbon marker bound in. Illustrated by Gerry Gersten. A collection of thirty-five works by the sports columnist and short story writer known for satire, whose work was admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway. "Lardner's short stories about Jack Keefe, a bush-league baseball player, were first published in the Saturday Evening Post; many were later collected under such titles as The Real Dope (1919) and Treat 'Em Rough: Letters from Jack the Kaiser Killer (1918) in which Keefe is serving in Germany during World War I; "I am out of baseball now and in the big game...." During his short but highly successful career as writer Lardner enjoyed great popularity among his readership who came to love his satirical and effective use of vernacular slang, replete with typos, grammatical errors, and run-on sentences. Lardner began his career reporting on sports events, then went on to primarily write for the Chicago White Sox baseball club for various newspapers. After the scandal of the World Series in 1919 Lardner became disenchanted with the league and his writing took on a more jaded tone. Included among his more famous stories are "Golden Honeymoon", "Haircut", "Alibi Ike", "Some Like Them Cold", and "A Day in the Life of Conrad Green". Sometimes compared to Mark Twain, and lauded by such fellow authors as Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken and Virginia Woolf, Lardner also wrote on everyday events and topics, always with his unique blend of cynicism, sardonic wit, and warmth, endearing him to readers across the country and around the world."