[In the following review of Lose with A Smile, Mencken argues that critics ignore Lardner because of his attack on idealism and sentimentality.]

Writing in this place in July, 1924, I permitted myself to predict that it would be a long while before the professors of literature would become aware of Ring Lardner—indeed, I ventured to say that they would probably not discover him and begin to titter over him until years after he had got to the electric chair. That prophecy has now gathered a considerable age, as such things go, and is become mellow and even mossy. Lardner goes on publishing his incomparable studies of the low-down American, and the professors continue to look straight through him, just as they looked through Mark Twain in 1900 and Walt Whitman in 1875. A few critics outside the academic breastworks, notably Clifton Fadiman, have begun to write about him appreciatively, but not, so far as I know, a single debaucher of youth. He remains, by the classroom standard, a mere popular entertainer, clowning for the club-car and the locker-room in the Saturday Evening Post. But he is really very much more than that, and in some remote age, no doubt, a pedagogue rooting in the past will unearth him and be enchanted by him, as William Lyon Phelps unearthed and was enchanted by Mark Twain.

What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? By what attributes do we estimate and esteem him? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story And the third is that he should say something about the people he deals with, either explicitly or implicitly, that is apposite and revelatory—in brief, that he should play upon them with the hose of a plausible and sufficiently novel and amusing metaphysic. All of these kinds of skill you will find in every really first-rate novelist. They are what make him what he is.

In Lardner, it seems to me, they are all conspicuous. No writer in our history has ever done livelier or more lifelike portraits of the nether American. There can never be any doubt in a rational mind that his people are real. There is, indeed, an overwhelming reality in every detail of their clumsy and brutal behavior, in every tremor of their shabby souls, even in every grunt of their half-simian speech. Observing these dismal pugs, song writers, movie wenches, radio crooners and baseball players as they shuffle across the stage, it is quite impossible to doubt them. Never for an instant do they do or say anything that is out of character. Nor is there ever anything improbable in the tricks that fate plays upon them. If accurate character-drawing and adept plot-making were the whole of imaginative writing, then it would be difficult to think of even a pedagogue denying Lardner's high place in the trade.

What makes him suspect, of course, is the nature of his philosophy. He offends by denying the doctrine that the purpose of literature is to spread sweetness and light. He seems to be wholly innocent of any aim to make the world a better place to live in, whether for pedagogues or for the rest of us. What interests him is not human aspiration, but only human frailty, and his taste inclines him to examine it in some of its most sordid and discomforting forms. There is not the slightest reason for saying that he actually admires his wretched cowards and scoundrels; on the contrary, it must be plain that his contempt for them amounts almost to detestation. But certainly they interest him enormously—certainly he is far more interested in them than he is in more seemly folk. So he is damned for not keeping better company, and under cover of that virtuous damnation his extraordinary skill is overlooked.

Sinclair Lewis, after "Elmer Gantry", suffered from the same stupidity. He had shocked American prudery by showing that a man of God could be also a rogue, and he was belabored for it violently and dishonestly. Indeed, until the Nobel Prize forced a certain respectability upon him and the sentimentality of "Ann Vickers" proved that his heart, after all, was in the right place, there was a general tendency to dismiss him as one who had degraded the inspiring art of fiction to the uses of atheistic propaganda. Lardner, unsuccored by the Swedes and sticking to his guns, is not likely to enjoy any such moral rehabilitation. He will be avoided by the champions of literary delicacy until he is no longer a menace to idealism, and then they will try to convert him into something that he is not, as they have long since converted Swift, Smollett and Sterne. But meanwhile he bangs on in his own way, choosing his own marks and his own weapon. He writes little, but most of that little, within its limits, is perfect.

There are no heroes in "Lose With a Smile". The baseball player who is its principal figure is a mephitic shape, and his girl is scarcely better. They are far too elemental to come within the orbit of Freudism. In their psychology there is no maze of complexes; they are simply souls whose only hope and aspiration is to scratch along. Nor does Lardner try to read anything into them that is not there. He takes them as they are, and lets them tell their own story. It is vastly amusing, but there is a great deal more in it than a series of laughs.