Gullible’s Travels

Published in The Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1917, the stories that make up Gullible’s Travels follow the comical misadventures of a long-suffering husband and his aspiring socialite wife. The unnamed protagonists and their hapless attempts to climb the social ladder serve as a canvas for Ring Lardner to satirize marriage, social dynamics, and the newly emerging middle class of the late 1910s.

In 1917, the first five stories about the unnamed narrator and his “Missus” were compiled in book form as Gullible’s Travels, Etc. This Standard Ebooks edition also includes a later sixth story, “A Friendly Game,” which didn’t make it to print until after the contents of that book were finalized. Each story shares a common “fish out of water” theme wherein the narrator and his wife find themselves in social situations in which they’re clearly out of their element, including grand operas, Palm Beach resorts, and bridge clubs. The stories also explore timeless, familiar struggles of domestic life, like squabbling over the in-laws and introducing new acquaintances into established social circles.

Unlike much of Lardner’s writing, the subject matter of these stories is much more generally relatable. This, coupled with the more approachable writing style compared to some of his more epistolary works like the Jack Keefe stories, led these stories to be well-regarded. They gained enough popularity for a second printing in 1925 and eventually a paperback edition in the 1960s—though these subsequent editions still lacked the sixth story.