You Know Me Al

Description

You Know Me Al is a comic strip written by Ring Lardner, and it features the fictional letters of a gullible, but talented baseball player called Jack Keefe to his friend left back home in Indiana.

The letters tell about Jack’s adventures, experiences and exploits as a professional baseball player, about how everyone around tries to take advantage of him. His stories are hilarious, partly because of his complete inability to recognize when he is being manipulated, partly because he is not only naïve, but also self-centered, boastful and uneducated. Al is the only character in the entire book who has never taken advantage of Jack’s simple and egotistic nature and the only one loyal to him through the entire book. You Know Me Al is not only a humorous book – it is also an excellently written and accurate sports novel. All the characters in the baseball world that Jack comes into contact with, from club owners to fellow players, are based on real life characters with only one exception, one of Jack’s teammates, Allen who is entirely fictional. The reader finds six stories in the book that track Jack’s rise to success, the book ending with Jack and his team preparing to go to Japan for a baseball exhibition.

Lardner is an excellent comic writer and a great expert in baseball. In 1907 he worked as a sportswriter in Chicago and covered baseball news to several local magazines and newspapers. His first fictional writing, A Busher’s Letters Home, used not only his comic talent, but also his knowledge as a sports reporter, and he continued to write baseball stories even after the resounding success of You Know Me Al, published in 1916 – no wonder the book brought Lardner so much appreciation, as it features his exceptional style, his satire and his wit at their very best.
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