Fred Gross Stories

“Well Charley after alls said & did its the only life when you got children & if I was you Id get busy & get in to the game.”

Fred A. Gross, assistant chief of detectives for the Chicago Police Department, is living the American Dream by leaving his South Side Chicago flat to build a house on greener pastures in the suburb of Allison, Illinois. Through a series of letters to his brother Charley in New York, Fred offers a revealing glimpse into the conflicts and schemes of his new life. Whether he’s dealing with dishonest contractors, feuding with his neighbors, or crafting a get-rich-quick scheme in the wartime stock market, Fred holds nothing back and shares almost every detail of his new life with his brother—no matter how those details make him look.

Ring Lardner originally published the Fred Gross stories in The Red Book Magazine from 1915–1917. The first four stories were later novelized under the title Own Your Own Home.

As is often true of protagonists in Lardner’s epistolary stories, Fred Gross writes in an uneducated style and fills the page with countless spelling and grammatical errors. Also in common with Lardner’s other epistolary protagonists, he’s often oblivious to the social happenings around him, remaining blissfully ignorant of the fact that the true villain of his story isn’t his rude neighbors, nor the shady contractors or car salesmen, but rather his own lack of foresight, impulse control, and general social decorum.

Though not as well-known as the Jack Keefe Stories, Fred Gross has a similar sort of hapless incompetence as Keefe, but with middle-class domestic life as the backdrop instead of professional baseball. Readers experience Fred Gross not as a parody of their celebrity idols, but as a parody of themselves and their own social circles.