This Forgotten Michigan Author Was More Famous Than Hemingway

One of the most famous sportswriters in American history came from a small town in Southwest Michigan.

His name was Ring Lardner, and if that name doesn't mean much to you today, it definitely would have 100 years ago.

Lardner was one of the most famous writers of the early 20th century. He became famous writing about baseball, then became even more famous writing short stories and satire.

He spent more than 20 years writing for some of the biggest newspapers and magazines in the country and, at his peak, was one of the biggest names in America.

But before any of that, he was just a kid from Niles, Michigan.

Ring was the youngest of nine children. His father, Henry, was a businessman and his mother, Lena, raised their huge family. They lived in a big house at 519 Bond Street in Niles, which is still standing today.

Growing up, Ring loved baseball, music, and basically anything that would put him in the spotlight. He acted in school plays, sang in the choir, and pumped the organ every Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Church.

He graduated from Niles High School in 1901 before enrolling at the Armour Institute in Chicago, where he failed every class except rhetoric. After that didn't work out, he got fired from two office jobs and ended up back home working as a bookkeeper for the Niles Gas Company.

And then one day in 1905, he lied his way into landing a job that would inevitably make him famous.

An editor from the South Bend Times came to Niles looking to hire Ring's older brother, Rex, who actually was a newspaper reporter. Rex was away on vacation, so Ring asked about the job for himself.

The editor asked if he'd ever worked for a newspaper before, and even though he hadn't, Ring lied, said yes, and got the job anyway.

Luckily for the South Bend Times, he turned out to be really, really good at it.

Baseball was his main focus. Lardner knew the game, but he didn't want his sportswriting to sound so serious all the time. He made his stories playful and funny, which was practically unheard of at the time.

He started to become pretty popular around the area, and before long, bigger newspapers came calling.

Lardner then worked for papers in Chicago, St. Louis, and Boston before returning to the Chicago Tribune in 1913. His column, In the Wake of the News, eventually appeared in more than 100 newspapers across the country.

He also started selling baseball stories to The Saturday Evening Post, and that's when Lardner became much more than just a sportswriter.

After spending years around professional baseball players, he began to pick up on all their little antics, the way they talked, acted, and even wrote. He used all of that to start creating fictional stories about baseball players, most famously “You Know Me Al,” and they took off.

People loved it, and Lardner became a literary star.

What made his writing so special was his sense of humor. He was funny, sarcastic, and increasingly bitter. He’d use satire to poke fun at baseball players and eventually just about everything else in American life.

But then, after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to intentionally lose the World Series, Lardner's relationship with the sport started to change.

He knew the team personally, and after the scandal, the game he'd loved since childhood was never really the same. That same year, Lardner left the Tribune and started focusing more on fiction and satire.

And he turned out to be really good at that too.

Over his career, Lardner wrote 130 short stories, more than two-thirds of which had nothing to do with baseball. He was published in some of the biggest magazines in the country, wrote plays and music, and became one of America's most celebrated humorists and storytellers.

After more than 20 years in the business, Ring Lardner was a full-blown celebrity. One biographer even described him as one of the 10 most famous men in America.

He was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, hung around people like W.C. Fields, and even golfed with President Warren Harding.

His work was also praised by some of the greatest writers of all time. Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf both admired his writing, and John O'Hara credited him with helping shape the way we write dialogue.

And again, this is a guy from Niles, Michigan, who lied his way into getting his first real job.

Unfortunately, by his early 40s, Ring's health had started to decline. He had tuberculosis and a heart condition but continued writing through much of it.

On Sept. 25, 1933, he suffered a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, New York, and died later that day at just 48 years old.

Now, more than 90 years later, practically nobody remembers his name.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald have gone on to become household names, meanwhile Lardner, the writer they admired and befriended, has slowly faded into a name mostly known by baseball historians, journalists and English professors.

Back in Niles, though, his legacy lives on.

His childhood home still stands on Bond Street, he's a member of the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame, and there's even a middle school in Niles named in his honor.

Ring Lardner Middle School has carried his name for generations, and year after year, hundreds of kids in Michigan go to a school carrying the name of a guy who was once one of the most famous writers in America.