Ring around the Bases: The Complete Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner

An essential collection of baseball fiction by the master of the form

More than any other writer in the twentieth century, Ring Lardner was identified with baseball. His years as a newspaper reporter in Chicago covering the Cubs and White Sox gave him inside knowledge of the sport and how it reflected the American experience. Lardner’s baseball short stories remain the core of his career and the basis of his enduring reputation.

With his unerring eye for detail and his sense of the absurd, Lardner ranged over the entire game. He probed not only the nature of the game but also the lives of the men who played it. His famous portraits, such as those in Alibi Ike and My Roomy, express his complex responses to baseball and the people associated with it. Historically accurate and richly textured, Ring Around the Bases reveals the master at the height of his craft and celebrates the American pastime. The collection is the ultimate lineup in baseball fiction.

Ring Around the Bases was originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1992 in cloth. This new paperback edition includes an additional uncollected short story. Located after the publication of the cloth edition, The Courtship of T. Dorgan truly makes this volume of thirty-four stories the complete Lardner baseball collection.