Jack Keefe Stories
By Ring Lardner
- Release Date: 2026-06-11
- Genre: Classics
Description
“Well, Al old pal I suppose you seen in the paper where I been sold to the White Sox.” So begins the career of Jack Keefe, the busher — a young pitcher up from the minor leagues, certain he is the best arm in baseball and that the whole world is conspiring to deny him his due. In a long run of letters home to his friend Al, Keefe reports his triumphs and disasters, every one of them bent, without his ever knowing it, to flatter himself: when he is knocked off the mound it is the catcher’s fault, when he is benched it is jealousy, when he is sent back down he is only doing a weaker team a favour. Boastful, stingy, gullible, and gloriously self-deluded, Keefe blunders through the big leagues, two hasty marriages, and finally the First World War — writing home from an army camp and from France as sure he will win the war single-handed as he ever was of a no-hitter. Through it all runs the great comic engine of the book: the gap between what Jack tells Al and what plainly happened. Written entirely in the misspelled, ungrammatical voice of a man who cannot see himself at all, the Jack Keefe stories are one of the funniest books in American literature and one of the first to prove that the American vernacular could be art. First collected as You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters (1916) and its wartime sequels, they won the admiration of Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and H. L. Mencken, and their cold-eyed comedy of the American braggart has never lost its bite. This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on Lardner’s art and the vernacular voice, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.
