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Kate Sullivan
on an American wife's loneliness in Hong Kong
Paula Marantz Cohen on how teachers can bring literature alive
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After Fort Sumter, German immigrants in the city flocked to the Union cause and in bloody confrontations overthrew the local secessionists
In the early months of 1861—as the Confederate flag unfurled above Fort Sumter, as bands played and newly formed regiments paraded in towns and cities throughout the North and the South—two civilians sat disconsolately at the sidelines of the Civil War.
One had recently taken a desk job running a horse-drawn trolley line. He spent most of his days pushing papers, trying his hardest to concentrate on the minutiae of fare revenues and fodder costs, in an office permeated with pungent aromas from the company’s adjacent stables. The other man was a down-at-the-heels, small-town shop clerk who had come to the city in search of an officer’s commission. He camped out at his in-laws’ house, trudging around the city each day, fruitlessly trying to attract the attention of the local military authorities.
The trolley-car executive was named William Tecumseh Sherman. The luckless clerk was Ulysses S. Grant. Both—as unknown to one other, probably, as each was to the nation—had found themselves in St. Louis.
When the 1919 Black Sox scandal shattered Ring Lardner's reverence for the game, the great sportswriter took a permanent walk
At the height of his fame in the 1920s, humorist and short-story writer Ring Lardner was listed among the 10 best-known people in America. He wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, short stories for mass-circulation magazines, skits and songs for the Ziegfeld Follies, and the text of a daily comic strip. To the bulk of his readers, Lardner was the regular guy who had made it, the man who golfed with the president but was still friends with the train conductors. The only writer in the country who could get away with the salutation, “Well, friends,” he addressed the average American, the man he repeatedly called “Joe,” and he did this in a natural, unassuming style—a veritable idiom nicknamed “Lardner Ringlish”—removed from the formal conventions of correct prose.
But earlier in his career, Lardner was best known as a baseball writer, and much of his enduring reputation is tied to the national pastime. He covered baseball in what’s been called the Silver Age of the game—from 1900 to 1919—an era that ended with the infamous Black Sox scandal, ushering in, as irony would have it, the Golden Age of baseball. Lardner’s infatuation and eventual disillusionment with baseball offer a number of lessons about how we should think about the scandals in today’s game, and his writing illuminates our own love-hate relationship with baseball.