The John Lardner Reader: A Press Box Legend's Classic Sportswriting

This collection marks the return to print of John Lardner, one of America’s press box giants, a classic stylist whose wry humor and tireless reporting helped elevate sportswriting to art. The brilliant W. C. Heinz called Lardner “the best of us.” This book shows why.

 

Lardner applied his singular touch not only to his era’s icons—Joe Louis, Ted Williams, Satchel Paige—but to the scamps, eccentrics, hustlers, and con men in the shadow of sports. Whether in snappy columns or leisurely magazine pieces, Lardner held sport of every description up to the light, forever changing the way people wrote, read, and thought about their heroes, from superstars to scrappers. These forty-nine pieces represent sportswriting at the top of its game.

John Lardner (1913–60), the son of legendary humorist Ring Lardner, was a columnist for Newsweek; a frequent and much-honored contributor to the New Yorker, True, and Sport; and the author of It Beats Working, Strong Cigars and Lovely Women, and White Hopes and Other Tigers. John Schulian’s work has been included in Best American Sports Writing and Sports Illustrated’s Fifty Years of Great Writing. His Twilight of the Long-ball Gods: Dispatches from the Disappearing Heart of Baseball is available in a Bison Books edition. Dan Jenkins is the author of Jenkins at the Majors: 60 Years of the World’s Best Golf Writing, from Hogan to Tiger.