RING LARDNER'S YOU KNOW ME AL The Comic Strip Adventures of Jack Keefe

You Know Me Al is a book by Ring Lardner, and subsequently a nationally syndicated comic strip scripted by Ring Lardner and drawn by Will B. Johnstone and Dick Dorgan. The series ran from 1914 through 1919. The book consists of stories that were written as letters from a professional baseball player, Jack Keefe, to his friend Al Blanchard in their hometown of Bedford, Indiana.

Jack Keefe is a headstrong, gullible, cheap, naive, self-centered, egotistical and uneducated rube—but he has a strong pitching arm. He begins the book as a minor league player in Terre Haute, Indiana, who gets accepted by the big leagues to pitch for the Chicago White Sox, circa 1913. In his barely literate letters home to his friend Al, he details his first experiences in the big leagues, which ends in disaster as he pitches poorly and gets sent back down to the minors again. Later, he is accepted again by the majors, where he gains some success as a pitcher, but is taken advantage of by nearly everyone he meets. Lardner was a sportswriter who relocated to Chicago in 1907, where he covered the Cubs and White Sox baseball teams for several city newspapers, most notably the Chicago Tribune. He used his experiences as a baseball writer for his first published piece of fiction, "A Busher's Letters Home", for the Saturday Evening Post in 1914. According to the introduction of the book Ring Around the Bases: the Complete Baseball Stories of Ring Lardner, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the Post published nine of Lardner's baseball stories during 1914, six of which comprised You Know Me Al, published by George H. Doran Company in 1916. Out Of Print. Condition: Very Good. Edge wear. Bumped corners with a two inch bend on the bottom back cover corner. Small tear bottom back cover.