"You Know me Al" is a classic of baseball--the game and the community. Jack Keefe, one of literature's greatest characters, is talented, brash, and conceited. Self-assured and imperceptive, impervious to both advice and sarcasm, Keefe rises to the heights, but his inability to learn makes for his undoing. Through a series of letters from this bush-league pitcher to his not-quite-anonymous friend Al, Lardner maintains a balance between the funny and the moving, the pathetic and the glorious.

Nostalgic in its view of pre-World War I America--a time before the "live" ball, a time filled with...

These "sketches" comprise commentary that has appeared in various publications, including "Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Collier's," and "Trotter and Pacer," throughout Lardner's illustrious career.

Ring Lardner first burst upon the literary scene with his greatest popular success, "You Know Me Al". A sportswriter by trade, Lardner had a superb ear for regional peculiarities in speech and was loved for his sense of humor. Funny, sarcastic, sometimes bitter but always ironic, Lardner understood Americans-- their desires, their dreams, and their disappointments. Contained in "Haircut and Other Stories" are some of Lardner's best-known pieces: "Haircut", "Alibi Ike", "The Love Nest", "Zone of Quiet", and "Champion". Through these pages pass con men; an opinionated small-town barber; a nurse...

This collection brings together twenty-one of Lardner's best pieces, including the six Jack Keefe stories that comprise You Know Me, Al, as well as such familiar favorites as -Alibi Ike, - -Some Like Them Cold, - and -Guillible's Travels.-
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by...

This is an annotated and copiously illustrated edition of 24 baseball stories by Ring W. Lardner, including the six classic stories later collected as You Know Me Al. Two-thirds of the stories describe real teams, real players, and real situations, and the annotation and illustrations serve to identify the references of early twentieth-century major league baseball that Lardner covered as a reporter.

This is an annotated and copiously illustrated edition of 24 baseball stories by Ring W. Lardner, including the six classic stories later collected as You Know Me Al. Two-thirds of the stories describe real teams, real players, and real situations, and the annotation and illustrations serve to identify the references of early twentieth-century major league baseball that Lardner covered as a reporter.

This collection of fiction by writer, critic and sports editor Ring Lardner celebrates the American pastime of baseball.

The classic novel The Ecstasy of Owen Muir is the story of what happens in 1940s America when an idealistically, fiercely honest young man, with no strong religious affiliation, marries a Roman Catholic woman. In this brilliantly comic and pungent tale, Lardner dissects the thought control of the McCarthy era, business ethics, racial intolerance, attitudes toward sex, the Manhattan nightclub set, judicial procedures, and other social phenomenon. The author is a former Hollywood screenwriter who won Academy Awards for Woman of the Year in 1942 and MASH in 1970.