Short Fiction

Ring Lardner was a prolific 20th century American humorist and journalist best known for his baseball stories and reportage, whose corpus nevertheless spans a wide range of genres and styles. He began his professional career as a sports reporter, but his literary career began in earnest in 1913 when he took over the Chicago Tribune’s popular “In the Wake of the News” column, for which he wrote daily until 1919.

His career as an author of short fiction took off when his Jack Keefe Stories became an instant hit in the Saturday Evening Post, launching his career as a magazine-first author of fiction that spanned over one hundred different stories published in the era’s most popular magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan.

A disenchantment with baseball following the infamous game-fixing scandal involving his beloved Chicago White Sox in the 1919 World Series, followed by a tuberculosis diagnosis, mark a sharp decrease in the length of his stories, a pivot away from baseball as a subject, and a shift to a generally darker tone. This era, however, is when he wrote some of his most well-known and often-cited stories, like “Haircut” and “Some Like Them Cold,” the latter of which would later be adapted into his full-length stage play, June Moon. Lardner produced so many works of short fiction that stories would continue to appear in popular magazines for years after his death. Many of the stories in this edition have never been reprinted, remaining unavailable to readers for nearly a century.