Ring Lardner - Gullible's Travels: Three Without Doubled

GULLIBLE'S TRAVELS, ECT.....
Humorous stories of social climbing in America's "classless" society

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY.....
Ringgold Wilmer "Ring" Lardner (March 6, 1885 – September 25, 1933) was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings about sports, marriage, and theatre drama. Lardner started his writing career as a sports columnist, finding work with the newspaper South Bend Tribune as a teenager. Soon afterward, he accepted a job with the rival newspaper South Bend Times, the first of many professional switches. During 1907, he relocated to Chicago, where he gained a job with the Inter-Ocean, but within a year, he switched to work for to the Chicago Examiner, then the Tribune. Two years later, Lardner was in St. Louis, writing the humorous baseball column Pullman Pastimes for Taylor Spink and the Sporting News. Some of this work was the basis for his book You Know Me Al. Within three months, he was an employee of the Boston American.

During 1913, Lardner returned to the Chicago Tribune, which became the home newspaper for his syndicated column In the Wake of the News (started by Hugh Keough, who had died during 1912). The column appeared in more than one hundred newspapers, and is still published in the Tribune. Lardner's Tribune and syndicated writing was not exclusively sports related: his dispatches from/near the World War One front were collected in the book My Four Weeks in France, and his immersive coverage of the 1920 Democratic Convention resulted in Lardner receiving 0.5 votes on the 23rd ballot. During 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by "Jack Keefe", a bush league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made much use of the fictional author's idiosyncratic vernacular. It had initially been published as six separate but interrelated short stories in The Saturday Evening Post, causing some to classify the book as a collection of stories, others as a novel. Like most of Lardner's stories, You Know Me Al employs satire, in this case to show the stupidity and avarice of a certain type of athlete.

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