Ring lardner biography

(b. 6 March 1885 in Niles, Michigan; d. 25 September 1933 in East Hampton, New York), sportswriter and master of the short story who covered Chicago baseball and created the memorable character of pitcher "Jack Keefe," a "busher" with a large ego and a small brain.

Lardner was the youngest child of five in an economically comfortable, solidly Episcopal, conservative Republican family headed by Henry Lardner, a farmer and mortgage broker.

Born in a mansion on the St. Joseph's River, surgery helped him overcome the handicap of a deformed left foot. Lardner received his early education from his mother, Lena Bogardus Phillips Lardner, a poet, and later graduated from Niles High School in 1901.

At the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago (now the Armour College of Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology) from 1901 to 1902, Lardner briefly attempted to become the mechanical engineer his parents desired, but found he had "no m