Ring Lardner  Ringgold Wilmer "Ring" Lardner (March 5, 1885 – September 25, 1933) was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings on sports, marriage, and the theatre. His contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all professed strong admiration for his writing. Born in Niles, Michigan, Ring Lardner was the son of wealthy parents, Henry and Lena Phillips Lardner. He was the youngest of nine children. Lardner's name came from a cousin of the same name. The cousin had been named by Lardner's uncle, Rear Admiral James L. Lardner, who had decided to name his son after a friend, Rear Admiral Cadwalader Ringgold, who was from a distinguished military family. Lardner never liked his given name and abbreviated it to Ring, naming one of his sons Ring Jr. In childhood he wore a brace for his deformed foot until he was eleven. He also had a passion for baseball, stage, and music. He later attended the Armour Institute in Chicago. Lardner married Ellis Abbott of Goshen, Indiana, in 1911. They had four sons, John, James, Ring Jr., and David. Lardner died on September 25, 1933, at the age of 48 in East Hampton, New York, of a heart attack due to complications from tuberculosis. Lardner started his writing career as a sports columnist, finding work with the newspaper "South Bend Times" in 1905. In 1907, he relocated to Chicago, where he got a job with the " Inter-Ocean". Within a year, he quit to work for the "Chicago Examiner", and then for the "Tribune". Two years later, Lardner was in St. Louis, writing the humorous baseball column "Pullman Pastimes" for Taylor Spink and the "Sporting News". Some of this work was the basis for his book "You Know Me, Al". Within three months, he was an employee of the "Boston American". In 1913, Lardner returned to the "Chicago Tribune", which became the home newspaper for his syndicated column "In the Wake of the News" (started by Hugh Keough, who had died in 1912). The column appeared in more than 100 newspapers, and is still published in the "Tribune". Lardner's Tribune and syndicated writing was not exclusively sports related: his dispatches from/near the World War One front were collected in the book "My Four Weeks in France", and his immersive coverage of the 1920 Democratic Convention resulted in Lardner receiving 0.5 votes on the 23rd ballot.