[In the following review of How to Write Short Stories, Mencken claims that no contemporary American writes better, though he doubts Lardner's work will stand the test of time.]

Some time ago a young college professor brought out a "critical" edition of "Sam Slick," by Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, eighty-seven years after its first publication. It turned out to be quite unreadable—a dreadful series of archaic jocosities about varieties of Homo americanus long perished and forgotten, in a dialect now intelligible only to paleophilologists. Sometimes I have a fear that the same fate awaits Ring Lardner. The professors of his own day, of course, are quite unaware of him, save perhaps as a low zany to be enjoyed behind the door. They would no more venture to whoop him up publicly and officially than their predecessors of 1880 would have ventured to whoop up Mark Twain, or their remoter predecessors of 1837 would have dared to say anything for Haliburton. In such matters the academic mind, being chiefly animated by a fear of sneers, works very slowly. So slowly, indeed, does it work that it usually works too late. By the time Mark Twain got into the text-books for sophomores, two-thirds of his compositions, as the Young Intellectuals say, had already begun to date; by the time Haliburton was served up as a sandwich between introduction and notes he was already dead. As I say, I suspect sadly that Lardner is doomed to go the same route. His stories, it seems to me, are superbly adroit and amusing; no other contemporary American, sober or gay, writes better. But I doubt that they last: our grandchildren will wonder what they are about. It is not only, or even mainly, that the dialect that fills them will pass, though that fact is obviously a serious handicap in itself. It is principally that the people they depict will pass—that Lardner's incomparable baseball players, pugs, song-writers, Elks, Rotarians and golf caddies are flitting figures of a transient civilization—that they will be almost as puzzling and soporific, in the year 2000, as Haliburton's Yankee clock peddler is today.

The fact—if I may assume it to be a fact—is certainly not to be set against Lardner's account; on the contrary, it is, in its way, highly complimentary to him. For he had deliberately applied himself, not to the anatomizing of the general human soul, but to the meticulous histological study of a few salient individuals of his time and nation, and he has done it with such subtle and penetrating skill that one must belong to his time and nation to follow him. I doubt that anyone who is not familiar with professional ball players, intimately and at first hand, will ever comprehend the full merit of the amazing sketches in You Know Me, Al; I doubt that anyone who has not given close and deliberate attention to the American vulgate will ever realize how magnificently Lardner handles it. He has had more imitators, I suppose, than any other living American writer, but has he any actual rivals? If so, I have yet to hear of them. They all try to write the vulgar speech as adeptly and as amusingly as he writes it, and they all fall short of him; the next best is miles and miles behind him. And they are all equally inferior in observation, in sense of character, in shrewdness and insight. His studies, to be sure, are never very profound; he makes no attempt to get at the primary springs of passion and motive; all his people share the same amiable stupidity, the same transparent vanity, the same shallow inconsequentiality; they are all human Fords, and absolutely alike at bottom. But if he thus confines himself to the surface, it yet remains a fact that his investigations on that surface are extraordinarily alert, ingenious and brilliant—that the character he finally sets before us, however roughly articulated as to bones, is so astoundingly realistic as to hide that the effect is indistinguishable from that of life itself. The old man in "The Golden Honeymoon" is not merely well done; he is perfect. And so is the girl in "Some Like Them Cold." And so, even, is the idiotic Frank X. Farrell in "Alibi Ike"—an extravagant grotesque and yet quite real from glabella to calcaneus.

The present collection has a buffoonish preface on the art of writing short stories—a devastating reductio ad absurdum of the sort of bilge ladled out annually by Prof. Dr. Blanche Colton Williams and other such self-constituted experts. Lardner actually knows more about the management of the short story than nine-tenths of its most eminent practitioners. His stories are always built very carefully, and yet they always seem to be wholly spontaneous, and even formless. He has grasped the primary fact that no conceivable ingenuity can save a story that fails to show a recognizable and interesting character; he knows that a good character sketch is always a good story, no matter what its structure. He gets less critical attention than he ought to get, mainly, I believe, because his people are all lowly ignoramuses, presented without any sociological eye rolling. The reviewers of books, with few exceptions, seem to be easily impressed by lofty and fashionable pretensions. They praise F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories of country club flappers eloquently, and overlook his other stories, some of which are much better. They can't rid themselves of the superstition that Edith Wharton, whose people have butlers, is a better novelist than Willa Cather, whose people, in the main, dine in their kitchens. They linger under the spell of Henry James, whose most lowly character, at all events in his later years, was at least an Englishman, and hence superior. Lardner, so to speak, hits these critics below the belt. He not only fills his stories with people who read the New York Evening Journal, say "Shake hands with my friend," and wear diamond rings; he also shows them having a good time in the world, and quite devoid of inferiority complexes. They amuse him intensely, but he does not pity them. A fatal error! The moron has a place in fiction, as in life, but he is not to be treated too easily and casually. It must be shown that he suffers tragically because he cannot abandon the plow to write poetry, or the sample-case to study for opera. Lardner is more realistic. If his typical hero has a secret sorrow it is that he is too old to take up osteopathy and too much in dread of his wife to venture into bootlegging.

On the slip-cover of How to Write Short Stories I find the following gem: "One can say of Ring Lardner what can be said of few writers, that he never wrote an insincere word." I smack my lips over this singular blurb: can it be that the Scribners are trying to make good Ring respectable? If so, the effort will fail. The professors will shy at him until he is dead at least fifty years. He is doomed to stay outside where the gang is.