Ringgold Wilmer "Ring" Lardner (1885 - 1933) was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings about sports, marriage and the theater. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom professed strong admiration for Lardner's writing. Lardner started his writing career as a sports columnist, finding work with the newspaper South Bend Tribune as a teenager. Soon afterward, he accepted a job with the rival South Bend Times, the first of many professional switches. In 1907, he relocated to Chicago, where he gained a job with the Inter-Ocean, but within a year, he quit to work for the Chicago Examiner and then for the Tribune. Two years later, Lardner was in St. Louis, writing the humorous baseball column Pullman Pastimes for Taylor Spink and the Sporting News. Some of this work was the basis for his book You Know Me Al. Within three months, he was an employee of the Boston American.