Do You Know Me Now: Cultural Reflection and Resistance in Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al
Ring Lardner's novel You Know Me Al (1916) was first published as a series of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Since that time, critics have come to recognize the letters of Jack Keefe as the first instance of literary baseball fiction, an assessment that becomes problematic for some due to the Post's staunch middle-class audience. (1) While writers were drawn to the Post and other mass-market magazines because they paid well for short fiction, critics tended to discount the cultural value of such "machine-made stories." (2) With regard to style, Lardner's use of vernacular humor was already a proven commodity based on the number of newspapers sold by Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley in the first decade of the twentieth century. Thus, the production and nature of You Know Me Al are in keeping with criticism that it was shaped by commercial interests. Even so, Lardner's work struck a chord with the middlebrow audience of the Saturday Evening Post, as evidenced by the fact Post editor George Horace Lorimer published eighteen of his baseball stories between 1914 and 1919. Further support for Lardner's work came from Edmund Wilson and H. L. Mencken, two contemporary literary critics who believed his stories went beyond the "machine-made" qualities of other mass-market fiction. (3) A contributing factor to Lardner's winning of both of these audiences is that You Know Me Al tapped into the links between baseball and America that were being established the first decades of the twentieth century. More than just a pastime or a metaphor for the fledging nation, baseball provided a source of individual, local, and national identity for America and Americans. The game was enjoying a newfound sense of legitimacy as a part of the Progressive and Muscular Christian projects for self-improvement and Americanization through exercise. (4) Americans who became professional players could earn as much as double the average income for seven or eight months of "work," allowing poor and under-educated men the opportunity to get ahead. While baseball was entering its fifth decade as a professional sport, the "baseball creed" created by owners and sportswriters molded urban identities and reminded middle-class America of its glorious past and allowed it to look toward a bright future. (5) On the national level, Albert G. Spalding, an impressive player and the game's first great entrepreneur, convened a blue-ribbon panel in 1905 to "determine" that the game had been created by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, and put Henry Chadwick's notions about the contributions of English rounders to rest. Despite the bucolic and idyllic beginnings Spalding's group imagined, baseball was an urban game at the professional level, mirroring the migrations from the farm to the cities during the early-twentieth century. (6) Baseball was splashed across the pages of newspapers and pulp-fiction magazines, and when Charles Comiskey and John J. McGraw took their White Sox and Giants around the world from 1913 through 1914, they brought along a movie crew to record the historic event with the developing medium of film. If nothing else, the baseball in You Know Me Al would have resonated with a significant portion of the Post's audience due to the ubiquitous presence of the game. After tapping into the contemporary interest in baseball, Lardner further won over his middle-class Post audience by creating an American success story they could identify with. On a basic cultural level, pitcher Jack Keefe is just another young man from a small town trying to adjust to life in the city and prove to the folks back home that he is "making good" and taking his place in the world. However, when Lardner adds an ironic level to Keefe's portrayal, he slips in a cultural critique of America's transition from Victorian and rural mores to modern and urban values that resonated with critics of his time. Thus, a series of emblematic and problematic aspects of You Know Me Al illustrate how baseball fiction published in a mass-market magazine can both go along with and offer resistance to contemporary culture. …
Capitalism, nationalism, and the American short story
Short stories, like houses--or cars for that matter--should be built to last. They should also be pleasing, if not beautiful, to look at, and everything inside them should work. --Raymond Carver A good deal of the vitality and energy associated with the American short story originates at the intersection of two fundamental forces in the United States: capitalism and nationalism. From its earliest form in the sketch and tale, through its later manifestation in the magazine story, the collected edition, and the MFA thesis, the short story has been a profit-making literary genre for authors, publishers, and corporate interests. Moreover, the genre's demands for efficiency of form, cohesiveness, and economy of scale parallel in remarkable fashion the demands of managerial capitalism. A tightly written short story enacts the very same sense of what is good and what is valuable as does the efficiently run textile mill, railroad line, or port authority. At the same time, from its earliest form in Washington Irving's sketches of life in New York, through Bret Harte's California tales and James Baldwin's stories of black America, the short story in the United States has served a nationalist function. As early as 1830, American short stories were reprinted in England to help explain the new nationality called "American"; throughout the nineteenth century, Eastern magazines paid premium prices for tales of the South, the Southwest, the Pacific coast, and any other backwoods or bordered region claiming a distinction between insiders and outsiders. In the twentieth century the short story in the United States continues to serve the insatiable appetite of the American reader for tales of the marginalized, as the genre works to define the range of human phenomena included within the national borders. The intersections of capitalism and nationalism are multifarious, but there are incidents in history when the junction is particularly salient. One can imagine the excitement in 1860s California in the months when the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad, the final link in the transcontinental rail system connecting the East and West coasts, was imminent. The railroad, completed in May 1869, represented the strength and resources of the entire United States economy, including hundreds of thousands of overland immigrants, their labor and their capital. As the railroad approached, a group of literary entrepreneurs, including Bret Harte, founded the Overland Monthly in July 1868. The original title page asserted the mission of the new magazine, "Devoted to the Development of the Country." Although the magazine was modeled on the Atlantic Monthly, the founders rejected the title "Pacific Monthly" as too blatantly imitative of the Boston magazine: Harte's biographer, George Stewart, notes, "Overland had been chosen because it suggested the new railroad on the old overland trail which would be finished ... in less than a year" (Stewart 158). Harte's design of the magazine's logo, a bear straddling a railroad track, "intended to show how the `grizzly' ... so long the undisturbed monarch of the woods and canyons, was at last face to face with the ubiquitous engineer" (Pemberton 83). The bear spoke in August 1868, when the second issue of the Overland Monthly published Harte's story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp." The issue traveled East by steamer and caused an immediate sensation. George Stewart claims that The sudden appearance of the Luck was about as close to a miracle as one finds in literary history, for its author's previous writings had shown almost no indication of what was coming.... Together with a wholly new subject-matter the story thus offered to the world in many respects a new form. (164) The new form would come to be called "local color," an application of regional literature designed to inform and enlighten outsiders about the folkways and lifestyle of a particular locality and to solidify the sense among insiders that what comes naturally is culture. …
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited