Novel
You Know Me Al
Ring Lardner · 1916
Opening lines
FRIEND AL: Well, Al old pal I suppose you seen in the paper where I been sold to the White Sox.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Jack Keefe, a baseball pitcher from Bedford, Indiana, is sold to the Chicago White Sox and writes to his friend Al, who has stayed back home. The letters follow one another: in them he gives himself the best part, blames his catcher when he loses, borrows money, goes from one engagement to the next and always wants it known that he was right. The reader reconstructs what happened from what the writer does not see.
Context
The letters first appear as six stories in the Saturday Evening Post from March 1914, and were collected in a volume by George H. Doran only in 1916. The author, who had spent years on the train with the Chicago teams, never intervenes: there is no narrator and no commentary, only the letters, and the comedy arises from the gap between what the player writes and what the reader understands. Jack Keefe would return in other stories until 1919. Virginia Woolf wrote in 1925 that Lardner gave the best prose to come out of America, in a language that is not English.
Who it is for
An epistolary novel whose difficulty lies in its language: faulty spelling, the syntax of speech, the baseball slang of 1914. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
Praised by Virginia Woolf and by Mencken; its author received posthumously, in 1963, the highest distinction awarded by baseball writers.
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