Poetry
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This book offers a delightful window into early 20th-century American life through Lardner's sharp yet tender humor, making it a timeless read for fans of classic satire and family poetry.
Edition details
Book Summary
A collection of humorous and nostalgic poems and sketches from Ring Lardner's newspaper column, blending baseball satire, family life, and childhood innocence. The book captures early 20th-century American domestic and professional worlds with wit and affection.
This volume gathers poems and prose pieces originally published in Ring Lardner's Chicago Tribune column 'In the Wake of the News' between 1913 and 1919. The works range from a nostalgic class poem celebrating the Class of Nineteen-One to baseball parodies like 'A Split Century' and 'Heine’s Soliloquy,' which use sports as a lens for human folly. Family life is a central subject: 'To the New One' welcomes a newborn son, 'The Phantom Sister' depicts a child's imaginary friend, and 'Dave’s Imperturbability' celebrates a toddler's stoic resilience. Other pieces satirize journalism, theater, and domestic materialism, as in 'Home,' where a roach-infested flat is preferred to a soulless mansion. The collection also includes autobiographical notes, a glossary of slang, and illustrations of early 20th-century scenes. Throughout, Lardner balances gentle satire with genuine warmth, portraying everyday struggles and joys with a keen eye for human nature.
Reading guide
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Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Unknown Narrator
This narrator moves through the book as its constant consciousness, addressing a class of nineteen-one, a young stranger, and his own children with the same wry, confiding tone. His distinctive tension is between sentiment and self-mockery: he wants to honor graduations, babies, and ballplayers, yet keeps tripping over his own absurdity. He matters because every early poem is filtered through his shifting moods, making him less a fixed character than the sensibility that holds the collection together.
Young Stranger
The young stranger is the narrator's live-in audience and occasional antagonist, the child whose face must be washed, whose playthings must be gathered, and whose endless questions exhaust the speaker's goodwill. The tension is affectionate exasperation: the narrator cheerfully performs most duties but openly begs for relief from the interrogation. This relationship anchors the book's middle stretch, where the grand public themes of class poems and baseball give way to the intimate, funny labor of raising a small child.
Harry B. Wallace
A diamond importer and acquaintance of the narrator.
Brother Jim
Brother Jim is the household's celebrated prodigy, a boy whose single utterance of 'Daddy' prompts triumphal music and makes the warring nations seem like trifles. Yet his darker comic side emerges in his mysterious antipathy toward baby number three, whom he longs to slap despite the infant's total innocence. He matters because he embodies the collection's blend of paternal pride and domestic absurdity, turning a baby's first word and a toddler's grudge into subjects worthy of mock-heroic verse.
Daddy
The narrator's father, referenced in personal anecdotes.
Charley Deneen
Former governor and lawyer, a political figure in the narrative.
Childhood and Family
The book is filled with poems about children, their development, family dynamics, and the joys and frustrations of parenthood, from a child's first words to sibling rivalry and parental discipline.
Nostalgia and Memory
Many poems reflect on past experiences, school days, and cherished moments, often with a sentimental or wistful tone, as seen in the class poem and reflections on childhood.
Humor and Satire
The collection uses lighthearted humor, puns, and gentle satire to comment on everyday life, including work, family, and social interactions, such as in the limericks about various professionals.
Work and Profession
A significant portion of the book consists of short, witty poems about specific individuals and their occupations, highlighting the quirks and challenges of various jobs in early 20th-century Chicago.
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