John Abbott Lardner

Background

John Abbott Lardner was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of the writer Ringgold (Ring) Wilmer Lardner and Ellis Abbott. Both parents came from prosperous small-town Middle West families. When John was four, the Lardners moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and soon thereafter to Great Neck, Long Island.

Education

John attended private school in Great Neck and then Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachussets. He entered Harvard College in 1929. He remained there only a year before leaving for Paris, where he studied briefly at the Sorbonne.

Career

While still a boy, Lardner had demonstrated the interest in sports and the wit that would mark his later writing. A family friend and neighbor, the columnist Franklin P. Adams, published in his column the ten-year-old's first printed work, which was, typically, about sports: Babe Ruth and old Jack Dempsey, Both sultans of the swat; One hits where other people are, The other where they're not. Ironically, thirty-eight years later, John Lardner suffered a fatal heart attack while writing an appreciation of Adams, who had died the day before. Lardner had decided on a career in journalism and after his college studies he spent a few months working on the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune.

When he returned to New York in 1931, he found a job as a reporter with the Herald Tribune. For the next two-and-a-half years he wrote general news stories for the city desk and reviewed books on sports for the Sunday book section. Lardner left the Herald Tribune to concentrate on sports by writing a syndicated column for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), a position he held until 1948. To support his family, he began writing sports articles for magazines. In 1939 he took on a column for Newsweek called "Sport Week. " But when World War II broke out in Europe, Lardner requested a foreign assignment.

Two months after Pearl Harbor, Newsweek sent him overseas as a war correspondent; his column, "Lardner Goes to the Wars, " appeared throughout the war datelined Australia, the South Pacific, North Africa, Italy, and finally Iwo Jima and Okinawa. At the same time he also wrote stories for newspapers syndicated by NANA and longer magazine articles for the Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker, which were published in book form as Southwest Passage: The Yanks in the Pacific (1943). The Lardner sons seemed to share a family characteristic of bravery. A fellow journalist described the nearsighted Lardner as a man "who walked toward the bomb flashes in order to see better. " Two of his brothers were less lucky: James died fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war, and David was killed during World War II while working as a war correspondent for the New Yorker.

After World War II Lardner's work was much in demand, and in 1948 he dropped his syndicated sports column and began writing exclusively for magazines. Although sports remained a special love, his interests were diverse. In 1952 Lardner initiated a feature page in Look called "John Lardner's New York, " which gave him the scope to write on varied subjects, although most of the articles discussed the theater. A bout with tuberculosis forced him to drop this new venture by the end of the year. At that point Lardner changed his Newsweek column from "Sport Week" to "Lardner's Week, " thus enabling him to extend the range of his interests.

In 1958, when he began to fear a loss of mobility due to an advancing case of multiple sclerosis, he decided to concentrate on television criticism in a new New Yorker column called "The Air. " By the late 1950's Lardner had achieved a considerable reputation. His peers considered him a fastidious writer with a sophisticated sense of humor. His prose was "sinewy and spare. and moved in lean brisk tempos" yet left "a curious impression of belonging to a richly romantic past. " One journalist observed that Lardner had a great deal of "that fine, old-fashioned quality called taste. " Roger Kahn, eulogizing him in a posthumous collection of his essays, observed that although Lardner was a matchless sportswriter, his craft was not sportswriting or profile-writing or column-writing but "purely writing: writing the English sentence, fusing sound and meaning, matching the precision of the word with the rhythm of the phrase. It is a pursuit which is unfailingly demanding, and Lardner met it with unfailing mastery. " He died young as he had predicted, in New York City.

Achievements

• John Lardner was best known as an American sports columnist. His articles for the magazines and newspapers ranged from sport news and the war events, to an analysis of the Lindbergh legend and a history of drinking in America. His materials were published by twenty magazines during the postwar years, and it also appeared in three collected sets of essays: It Beats Working (1947), White Hopes and Other Tigers (1951), and Strong Cigars and Lovely Women (1951).

Works

More photos

• book

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

    ( This collection marks the return to print of John Lardn...)

  • Southwest Passage: The Yanks in the Pacific

    ( At a time when few Americans had visited Australia, jou...)

  • White Hopes and Other Tigers

    (Cover heavily stained and blemished. Spine stamping is wo...)

  • It beats working;
  • Strong cigars and lovely women (Newsweek book shelf)
  • The World of John Lardner,

Personality

Lardner most resembled his father in character and interests. He had the same quiet, deadpan humor; the same love of sports, poker, and good fellowship; and the same dignity, reserve, and literary standards. Like his father, Lardner was a craftsman and an individualist.

Quotes from others about the person

• The editors of Newsweek recalled: "He had liked Shakespeare for his genius and Jane Austen for her style and sports for their excitement and good Scotch for the camaraderie that comes after a drink or two. He disliked anecdotes and pomposity and shouting, and, most of all, he disliked bad writing. "

Connections

On September 14, 1938, Lardner married Hazel Cannan Hairston, a reporter.

Father:

Ringgold (Ring) Wilmer Lardner

American sports columnist, short story writer

Mother:

Ellis Abbott

Spouse:

Hazel Cannan Hairston

Reporter

Brother:

David Lardner

Correspondent

Brother:

James Lardner

Brother:

Ring Lardner Jr.

American journalist, screenwriter