Bib Ballads. Lardner Ring

      

      BIB BALLADS

      BY

      RING W. LARDNER

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Contents

       Ring Lardner

       FOREWORD

       GOOD-BY BILL

       A VISIT FROM YOUNG GLOOM

       AN APPRECIATIVE AUDIENCE

       DISCIPLINE

       INEXPENSIVE GUESTS

       HIS SENSE OF HUMOR

       SPEECH ECONOMY

       WELCOME TO SPRING

       TASTE

       RIDDLES

       HESITATION

       HIS WONDERFUL CHOO-CHOOS

       GLOSSARY

       COUSINLY AFFECTION

       MY BABY’S GARDEN

       DECISION REVERSED

       THE GROCERY MAN AND THE BEAR

       COMING HOME

       HIS IMAGINATION

       HIS MEMORY

       CONFESSION

       HIS LADY FRIEND

       DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

       THE ETERNAL GREETING

       GUESS AGAIN

       EARLY A SINECURE

       THE HECKUSES

       HIS FAVORITE ROLE

       THE PATHS OF RASHNESS

       THE NEW PLAYTHING

      Ring Lardner

      Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan in 1885. He studied engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, but did not complete his first semester. In 1907, Lardner obtained his first job as journalist with the South Bend Times. Six years later, he 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. A huge hit, the book earned the appreciation of Virginia Woolf and others.

      Lardner went on to write such well-known short stories as ‘Haircut’, ‘Some Like Them Cold’, ‘The Golden Honeymoon’, ‘Alibi Ike’, and ‘A Day with Conrad Green’. He also continued to write follow-up stories to You Know Me Al, with the hero of that book, the headstrong but gullible Jack Keefe, experiencing various ups and downs in his major league career and in his personal life. Private Keefe’s World War I letters home to his friend Al were collected in Treat ‘Em Rough (1918).

      Aside from his much-loved short stories, Lardner was also a well-known sports columnist. From 1909 onwards, he penned the humorous baseball column ‘Pullman Pastimes’ for Taylor Spink and the Sporting News in St, Louis. In 1913, he began his syndicated ‘In the Wake of the News’ column; it appeared in more than a hundred newspapers, and still runs in the Tribune.

      Lardner was a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers of the Jazz Age. He was published by Maxwell Perkins, who also served as Fitzgerald’s editor, and served as the model for the tragic character Abe North in Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). Lardner also influenced Ernest Hemingway, who sometimes wrote articles for his high school newspaper under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr. Lardner died in 1933, aged 48, of complications from tuberculosis.

      FOREWORD

      Dear Parents:—Don’t imagine, please,

      It’s in a boastful spirit

      I fashion verses such as these;

      That’s not the truth or near it.

      A hundred or a thousand, yes,

      A million kids there may be

      Who aren’t one iota less

      Attractive than this baby.

      I’ll venture that your household has

      As valuable a treasure

      As mine, but mine I know, and as

      For yours, I’ve not that pleasure.

      And that is why my book’s about

      Just one, O Dads and Mothers;

      But babes are babes, and mine, no doubt,

      Is very much like others.

      THE AUTHOR

      GOOD-BY BILL

      Dollar Bill, that I’ve held so tight

      Ever since