Frank Chances Diamond

“This is a comprehensive volume capturing the Lardner style and offering a considerable insight into America’s favorite sportswriter… Ron Rapoport has done a superb job in his selection“—The New York Journal of Books “Frank Chance's Diamond is a time machine. . .Lardner's writing reveals its exuberance and innocence, and exposes its prejudices, all while highlighting the joys of the era's baseball.”— Epoch Times At one time Ring Lardner’s baseball articles reached millions of readers through more than one hundred newspapers throughout America. Admirers of his writing included F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Virginia Woolf. He was as familiar to Americans in the 1920s as Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth. His articles about the players he knew, his World Series coverage, his poems, parodies, and jokes were unlike any other baseball reporting ever written, both in his time and since. Even a hundred years later, Lardner’s baseball journalism makes for delightful, often wildly funny, reading and offers a glimpse of where his ground-breaking baseball fiction came from. This book contains Lardner’s columns about Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, and Three-Finger Mordecai Brown and some fabulous lesser-known characters like Frank Schulte, Heine Zimmerman, Jim Schekard, Johnny Kling, Rollie Zeider, and Peaches Graham, as well as examples of Lardner’s coverage of the World Series—including the notorious 1919 Black Sox Series. Ron Rapoport’s introduction puts Lardner in his time and place and explains how his writing about baseball developed over the years.

An annotated and copiously illustrated edition of the 24 short stories published between 1914 and 1919 by Ring Lardner, which include the stories collected later and known as "You know me, Al."

"Sportswriter, storyteller, humorist - Ring Lardner was an American original. In this affectionate, entertaining, and authoritative biography, critic Jonathan Yardley gives us a new look at Lardner's all too short life and career."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"Tinker to Evers to Chance examines this pivotal moment in American history, when baseball became the game we know today. Each man came from a different corner of the country and brought a distinctive local culture with him: Evers from the Irish-American hothouse of Troy, New York; Tinker from the urban parklands of Kansas City, Missouri; Chance from the verdant fields of California's Central Valley. The stories of these early baseball stars shed unexpected light not only on the evolution of baseball and on the enthusiasm of its players and fans all across America, but also on the broader convulsions transforming the US into a confident new industrial society."--Page [4] of cover.

"This volume of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition includes the original nine stories selected by Fitzgerald for All the Sad Young Men, together with eleven additional stories, published between 1925 and 1928, which were not collected by Fitzgerald during his lifetime." "This edition of All the Sad Young Men is the first of the short-fiction collections in the Cambridge edition to be based on extensive surviving manuscripts and typescripts. The volume contains a scholarly introduction, historical notes, a textual apparatus, illustrations, and appendixes."--BOOK JACKET.

A unique new reference work, this encyclopedia presents a social, cultural, and economic history of American sports from hunting, bowling, and skating in the sixteenth century to televised professional sports and the X Games today. Nearly 400 articles examine historical and cultural aspects of leagues, teams, institutions, major competitions, the media and other related industries, as well as legal and social issues, economic factors, ethnic and racial participation, and the growth of institutions and venues. Also included are biographical entries on notable individuals—not just outstanding athletes, but owners and promoters, journalists and broadcasters, and innovators of other kinds—along with in-depth entries on the history of major and minor sports from air racing and archery to wrestling and yachting. A detailed chronology, master bibliography, and directory of institutions, organizations, and governing bodies—plus more than 100 vintage and contemporary photographs—round out the coverage.

This is more than a biography of the great humorist from Niles, Michigan. In a penetrating full-length portrait, Donald Elder has explored Ring Lardner’s whole world—the vibrant and inventive times in which he lived, the unforgettable people who surrounded him, and the impudent words that came from his typewriter. At the height of Lardner’s fame in the middle twenties he was known simultaneously as a baseball reporter unlike any the world had ever seen; a newspaper columnist part gadfly and part reporting etymologist; a writer of short stories as rich in native, idiom as they were polished in execution; and as a humorist who deplored the telling of “stories” as such. Whenever anyone said. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one, “Ring would never hesitate to say, “Stop.” Lardner spent an idyllic if somewhat unorthodox youth as the youngest among nine children—(at sixteen he knew how to say “Ich war ein und zwanzig Jahre alt,” to a gullible German-speaking local bartender). Mr. Elder chronicles the Lardner career from the earliest years through the sports-writing days in Chicago, his marriage and love of home life, and the continued flowering of his literary talents. Then comes the pathetic decrescendo in which he fought his appetite for liquor, tried to beat TB, and finally died at the age of 48, in 1933. Mr. Elder, who grew up in Ring Lardner's hometown, has included liberal selections from Lardner's writing all through the book, and there is a complete listing of all his published work at the end. Four years of meticulous research went into the writing of this valuable and entertaining appreciation of Ring Lardner's career. “A fine biography of Ring Lardner”—Kirkus Review

Ring Lardner’s influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country’s best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner’s trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner’s journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era—from Jack Dempsey’s fights to the World Series and even an America’s Cup—he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life. The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner reintroduces this journalistic giant and his work and shows Lardner to be the rarest of writers: a spot-on chronicler of his time and place who remains contemporary to subsequent generations.

Though they never led the league in double plays turned, and though at times they actively disliked one another, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance of the Chicago Cubs have for decades been called one of the greatest, most colorful and most memorable double-play combinations of all time. But their places in the Hall of Fame have been disputed by some who believe their reputation rests with a piece of Franklin P. Adams doggerel. This triple biography of Tinker, Evers, and Chance covers each man's career and life before and after baseball, giving special attention to their relationship on and off the field. The author also considers the trio's induction into the Hall of Fame in 1946 and examines the arguments made on both sides of the debate.