Ring Lardner's humor, quirky imagination, and ear for the American vernacular endeared him to such formidable critics as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, V. S. Pritchett, and Virginia Woolf. A newspaperman who began as a sports reporter and almost accidentally stumbled into short-story writing, Lardner meticulously captured the way Americans really speak. In You Know Me Al (1916), he created one of the most enduring characters in American fiction, the semi-literate baseball player Jack Keefe.