Books in Brief: Letters from Ring

Letters from Ring, edited by Clifford M. Caruthers (Walden Press, distributed by Northern Illinois University Press, 305 pp., $10.95). Of Ring Lardner there is, apparently, no end. Two biographies, a family memoir, a bibliography, a volume of previously uncollected stories, and countless articles are available to the Lardner buff. Clifford Caruthers, who edited the Perkins-Lardner correspondence in Ring around Max (1973), has finally gotten around to the sportswriter-satirist’s other letters, notably to his family and to friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and H. L. Mencken. Lardner’s favorite literary form was the letter, and the best of his own letters are revealing and rewarding. Baseball reporting, fiction writing, Great Neck (which was the inspiration for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby), why Lardner preferred George Ade to Mark Twain—all are here. Also here are 125 pages of courtship letters, which are as unnecessary as they are tedious. There is nothing new or particularly valuable in the editorial commentary, and the setting of the book in imitation typewriting is distracting, even barbarous, although certainly original. In short, Letters from Ring is nothing to write home about, and recommended only for the Lardner compleatist.