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The Real Dope

Ring Lardner

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .But of course its different with a man like I because I am always where they is something big going on and first it was baseball and now its a bigger game yet you might say but whatever is going on big you can always count on me being in the mist of it and not buried alive in no Indiana X roads where they still think the first bounce is out. But of course I know it is not your fault that you haven't been around and seen more and it ain't every man that can get away from a small town and make a name for themself and I suppose I ought to consider myself lucky.

Well Al enough for this time and I will write soon again and I would like to hear from you even if you haven't nothing to say and don't forget to send me a Chi paper when you get a hold of one and I asked Florrie to send me one every day but asking her for favors is like rolling off a duck's back you might say and its first in one ear and then the other.

Your pal, JACK.

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Community Reviews

Fairly Goodreads

The writer seems to be better with short stories than a longer read. He lost me at times but I had to go back to catch up.

Sorry, I don't remember the plot on this one.

Guess it just isn't my kind of humor....more

I really liked You Know Me Al and was hoping for more of the same here. I guess I got it, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable. I read somewhere that Lardner tired of the format of these stories, feeling that the epistle approach was a severe limitation of his capabilities. I think that is more evident

Ring Lardner was a widely admired writer just 100 years ago. His fans included Ernie Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. He was known as a sportswriter but he also wrote fiction, especially baseball fiction. His book YOU KNOW ME AL was a collection of letters by a ignorant, self-absorbed pitcher in the bu

Novella by a Michigan author from the early 20th Century. He was known primarily as a sportswriter in the 1920s. This was not one of his best works but it showed humor and an interesting slant on the AEF in World War I.

I'm not sure why I read this through to the end, other than I admire Lardner and kept hoping it would get better. I thought a novel about Jack Keefe (the comic blowhard anti-hero of YOU KNOW ME AL) fighting in World War I would be either funny or exciting, but it's neither. The book is nothing more