Ring Lardner wrote You Know Me Al

Ring Lardner

It is the birthday of writer Ring Lardner (1885), who is remembered for his novel You Know Me Al (1916), a collection of satirical vernacular letters by a fictional bush league baseball player to his friend back home in Indiana. The series first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Lardner also wrote many short stories, including The Golden Honeymoon (1922), an amusing tale of a retired couple who travels by train to St. Petersburg for vacation.

For many years, Lardner wrote the nationally syndicated column In the Wake of the News for the Chicago Tribune. The column appeared in more than 100 newspapers around the country and made Lardner a household name. When the Black Sox scandal broke in 1919, Lardner felt betrayed by his beloved Chicago White Sox. Some White Sox players, it developed, had taken bribes to make sure the Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series that year.

Lardner was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald and other contemporary writers. Famed editor Max Perkins worked with both of them. Perkins introduced Lardner to Ernest Hemingway, who had tried to emulate Lardner's style back in high school. However, no friendship developed between Lardner and Hemingway. English writer Virginia Woolf admired Lardner's writing, and he was considered one of the best humorists in America in his time.

Lardner collaborated with Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman to write June Moon, a comedy love story with lyrics and music by Lardner. It was a Tin Pan Alley romance based on Lardner's short story Some Like Them Cold. It was adapted for a 1937 film called Blonde Trouble. It was adapted for the live CBS television anthology program Studio One in 1949 and again, in 1974, for PBS.

Lardner got started as a sports reporter by stealing a job from his brother. Ring was working as a bookkeeper for a gas company in South Bend, Indiana, where his brother worked while moonlighting as a corespondent for The South Bend Times. A man from the paper came to offer the brother a staff job but Ring intercepted the message, told the man that his brother was locked in a contract he couldn't break, and offered himself as an alternative. Ring Lardner was hired and began his career in the newspaper business.

John P. Marquand wrote Mr. Moto novels

John P. Marquand

It is the birthday of writer John P. Marquand (1893), who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for his best-selling novel The Late George Apley (1937), a satire of Boston's upper class. The title character is a Harvard-educated Beacon Hill WASP. The book was adapted as a Broadway play in 1944 and later as a film starring Ronald Colman.

It was a distinct departure from Marquand's earlier Mr. Moto spy novels. Mr. Moto was initially a Japanese Imperial agent but was never the central character in the novels. He was a mysterious character who stayed mainly in the background. The plots usually concerned an American with a checkered past who becomes entangled in international intrigue in the Orient. In the process he meets a beautiful American woman. In the end, and always with help from the mysterious Mr. Moto, he overcomes the danger and gets the girl. Mr. Moto was always impeccably dressed and appeared rather benign but could be remarkably ruthless.

The Mr. Moto series originally appeared in Saturday Evening Post, which was looking for stories with an Asian hero following the death of Earl Derr Biggers, who created Charlie Chan. There were six Mr. Moto novels: Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935); Thank you, Mr. Moto (1936); Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937); Mr. Moto is So Sorry (1938); Last Laugh, Mr. Moto (1941); and Stopover: Tokyo (1957) which was reprinted under different titles in 1963 and 1977.

Beginning in 1937, 20th Century Fox made eight films loosely based on the book series. They starred Peter Lorre as Mr. Kentaro Moto, an Interpol agent with a good relationship with the Chinese rulers, a fondness for Western suits, and an inclination to use judo against the bad guys.

Marquand was a prolific writer whose short stories appeared frequently in the Saturday Evening Post beginning in 1921. He wrote 18 novels, the first of which was The Unspeakable Gentleman (1922).