About this Book

Lardner was the first great American writer to see the diverse possibilities of baseball as a subject. Indeed, as Bruccoli writes in his introduction, ``Lardner's 130 short stories, 46 of which are baseball stories, show a remarkable range.'' This volume collects all those diamond-related tales, including the famous Jack Keefe epistolary stories that made up the well-known volume You Know Me Al (1914), plus some prime journalistic pieces containing such eternally true statements as, ``Baseball is a business, a mighty big one.'' They all display the writer's excellence in capturing the idiom and nuances of baseball talk. -- Library Journal.