Ring Lardner: the humorist's apprenticeship

Born 6 March 1885, Niles, Michigan · the South Bend Times, from the fall of 1905 to mid-1907

The claim, stated exactly: Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan — twenty miles off, and Michigan's, as the boundary prints — and South Bend's claim on him is neither birth nor raising. It is the apprenticeship. His first newspaper job was here: hired by the South Bend Times in the fall of 1905, in the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame's account drawn from Jonathan Yardley's biography — the job meant for his brother Rex, taken by fibbing about his qualifications. Some modern publisher biographies date the start to 1907; the conflict prints, with 1905 carried on the Hall of Fame and Yardley, exactly as the authors record carries it. At the Times he worked the society, courthouse, and dramatic beats and rose to sporting editor before leaving in mid-1907 for Chicago. The Times years whole are in the authors record; what stands here is the humor standing the apprenticeship trained.

The humor record: The voice the South Bend desk trained became the defining American sports humor of its century. You Know Me Al — the bush-league pitcher's letters home, the comedy of a braggart who never hears himself — was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post from 1914 and published by Scribner's in 1916 under Maxwell Perkins. The shelf after it: Treat 'Em Rough (1918), The Big Town (1921), How to Write Short Stories (1924), Round Up (1929), and, with George S. Kaufman, the stage comedy June Moon (1929). He died at East Hampton in 1933. The first desk is this city's; the national work was made elsewhere, and the entry claims the one and not the other.

Sources

1. Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, Lardner entry, from Jonathan Yardley's biography — the fall 1905 hiring by the South Bend Times, the job meant for Rex, the beats, the sporting editorship, the mid-1907 departure.
2. The Lardner record in this history — the Times years whole, the 1907 variant dating, the bibliography.
3. The standard Lardner bibliography — You Know Me Al (1914 serialization; Scribner's, 1916), the shelf of 1918–1929, June Moon with Kaufman, the 1933 death.