The collection also contains an autograph [n.d.] for Glen Walton Blodgett and an article, 1937 Marcg 5, by H. B. Pettee on Ring Lardner clipped from "Reading & Collecting."

Ring Lardner, America's great humorist and shortstory writer, began his career as a sports writer. Because of his interest in baseball, he began putting stories in his newspaper column that were purportedly written by unlettered athletes. Lardner, who had an excellent ear for dialogue, actually wrote these stories in the voice of the fictional rookie ballplayer Jack Keefe, a White Sox pitcher, who writes letters to his friend Al Blanchard back home in Bedford, Indiana. Several streams of American comic tradition merge in You Know Me Al: the comic letter, the wisecrack, the braggart character, the use of sporting vocabulary and fractured English as a means to apologetics. This collection of short stories revealed Lardner's talent for the sports idiom he made famous. Usually cynical and pessimistic, his stories are peopled by ordinary characters. Lardner often used his own experiences as the model or inspiration for the fiction he wrote.

"An anthology of journalist Ring Lardner's writings on sports and other nonfiction topics that collects works that have been mostly unavailable for decades"--

Not only examining the writings of a critically neglected American novelist of the early 20th century, this study also uses Ring Lardner both as the basis for a theoretical inquiry into language and literature, and as a study of men and masculinity at the turn of the century.

An annotated and copiously illustrated edition of the 24 short stories published between 1914 and 1919 by Ring Lardner, which include the stories collected later and known as "You know me, Al."