Jack Keefe Stories

The arrogant, proud, and mostly illiterate Jack Keefe of Bedford, Indiana had already established a career pitching for the minor league baseball club in Terre Haute. His strong pitching arm attracted the attention of Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and before he knew it, Keefe had been signed to play for the team. Through the ups and downs of his life, from his baseball career, to his marriage and family, to his service in World War I and his eventual return to baseball, Jack Keefe documents everything in a series of letters to his old pal back home, Al Blanchard. Behind Keefe’s rube-like dialect, these stories offer a glimpse at significant figures and moments in the era’s baseball culture. Jack faces off against legends like Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Babe Ruth. He travels around the world as part of the 1913–1914 Baseball World Tour with the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants. He even fights in the trenches during World War I. The final stories take place during his 1919 season with the White Sox, a team who would become infamous for the game-fixing conspiracy in the 1919 World Series dubbed the “Black Sox Scandal.” Ring Lardner wrote the Jack Keefe stories from 1914–1919. The twenty-six stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, and while each can be enjoyed as a standalone story, they also form a larger continuous narrative arc. The first six stories were published in book form in 1916 as You Know Me Al, and they became landmarks of baseball culture. Two additional compilations were published containing the nine stories that span Jack’s time as a soldier in World War I under the titles Treat ’em Rough and The Real Dope. Ring Lardner’s unique ability to capture the dialect of middle America was cited as an influence by many authors who would eventually become household names, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. The Jack Keefe stories are Lardner’s earliest and most famous works that brought this dialogue style to the public eye.