ROUNDABOUT BLOG

RING LARDNER (1885-1933) was born Ringgold Wilmer Lardner in Niles, Michigan into a wealthy family. He was tutored privately in his home, and showed an early interest in music, athletics, theatre, and writing. After high school, he enrolled briefly in engineering school but, after failing every class except for writing, decided to pursue journalism. Lardner started his writing career in 1905 working as a sports reporter for the South Bend Times. In 1907 he moved to Chicago to report for the Chicago Examiner, traveling with the White Sox on their spring tour. In 1910 the St. Louis Sporting News offered him a position as their managing editor and featured writer, which he eagerly accepted. However, Lardner couldn’t stay away from Chicago for too long, especially once the Chicago Tribune offered him the opportunity to write for the daily column “In the Wake of the News”. In 1916 Lardner published his first book, You Know Me Al, originally published as six separate but related short stories from the The Saturday Evening Post. You Know Me Al developed into a nationally syndicated comic strip written by Lardner and drawn by Will B. Johnstone and Dick Dorgan. Lardner went on to publish many other short stories such as “Haircut”, “Some Like Them Cold”, “The Golden Honeymoon”, “Alibi Ike,” and “A Day with Conrad Green.” He also pursued his long time passion for theater and music, writing the play June Moon which premiered at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1929 and wrote songs and lyrics for Bert Williams, Jerome Kern and Aubrey Stauffer, among others. Lardner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were good friends, and remained so until his death in 1933 at the age of 48, of complications from tuberculosis.

PG WODEHOUSE (1881-1975) was born in Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom to Eleanor and Henry Ernest. Wodehouse’s father was a magistrate resident in the British colony of Hong Kong, so as a young child he and his two older siblings traveled a fair amount without seeing their parents for long periods of time. Many biographers believe that this isolation caused him to avoid emotional engagement in both his life and his works, but allowed for him to create fantastical imaginary worlds from a very early age. At the age of 12, Wodehouse followed his brother to Dulwich College, a boarding school for boys in southeast London. There he was able to sing, become an editor for the school magazine and become involved in athletics. Wodehouse was expected to follow the path of his older siblings and go onto college, but his family’s finances took a turn for the worse and he was forced to take a job in the London office of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Wodehouse found the work to be extremely boring, and would long for the end of the day so he could go home and write. In 1902 he has his first real publication: his short story called “The Prize Poem” was published in Public School Magazine. He resigned from the bank that same month in order to devote himself to writing full time. Many of his early works were related to his experience in English boarding school, but he also wrote comic fiction, a series of novels, Broadway musical comedies that served as a precursor for the American musical, and even wrote for MGM in Hollywood during the 1930s. Wodehouse was famous for the extensive research he would do before starting a book (writing up to four hundreds pages of notes in preparation) and his use of highly original phrases and manipulation of language that made for humorous, clever dialogue and characters.

John Lithgow: Stories By Heart runs through March 4, 2018 at the American Airlines Theatre. For tickets and information, please visit our website.