Short Fiction

Ring Lardner (1885–1933) began as the most admired baseball writer in America and became one of the country’s most original satirists — the master of the overheard American voice. This collection gathers the best of his short fiction, the work of his maturity, in which he turned a merciless ear on the whole of American life.

Here are the famous stories. “Haircut” — his masterpiece — is a small-town barber’s genial monologue that, without his ever understanding what he is telling, lays bare a casual cruelty and a death that may not have been an accident. “Champion” follows a brutal prizefighter, celebrated as a hero, who beats his crippled brother on his way up. “Alibi Ike” is the ballplayer with an excuse for everything; “Some Like Them Cold,” a courtship conducted entirely in letters between two people forever giving themselves away; “The Golden Honeymoon,” one of the truest portraits of a long marriage in the language. Around them stand dozens more — “My Roomy,” “Zone of Quiet,” “Who Dealt?,” “A Day with Conrad Green.”

Lardner hands each story to one of his characters and then vanishes, letting barbers and ballplayers and gossips condemn themselves, sentence by sentence, out of their own mouths, while they believe they are only being friendly. Beneath the comedy runs a deadpan cruelty and a cold eye for the meanness and self-deception hiding under American cheerfulness. It was this seriousness that won him the admiration of Virginia Woolf, H. L. Mencken, Ernest Hemingway, and his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, who modelled a character on him and grieved him at his death.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on Lardner’s art and the vernacular voice, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.