Lardner on War

As the most famous journalist of the early twentieth century, Ring Lardner's wry skills as an observer and satirical bent as a writer weren't just confined to the sporting arenas of his day. In 1918 he packed his kit bag and his biting wit and headed off to France on assignment for Colliers, to cast a Lardneresque eye on the Great War. At the same time, he created a new wartime series of letters from the pen of his most famous fictional character-Jack Keefe-who had traded in his baseball flannels for military drab. LARDNER ON WAR puts together, for the first time, the two masterpieces from this era-"My Four Weeks in France" and "Treat 'Em Letters from Jack the Kaiser Killer"-to introduce the wit, wisdom, and whimsy of Ring Lardner to a new generation of readers.

Ring Lardner is considered to be one of America's greatest comic geniuses after Mark Twain, and baseball's greatest writer of all time. His writings on baseball are collected in Lardner on Baseball (page 00). He popularized the use of colloquial vernacular in American letters in such classics as You Know Me, Al, and Gullible's Travels. He died in 1933 at the age of forty-eight.