[Next Project] The Big Town by Ring Lardner

[Jon Erdman]

Scans: https://archive.org/details/cu31924021755685

Transcription: https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/rl/bigtown.html

Now that the Jack Keefe Stories omnibus is headed for review (only thing left is waiting on an answer to a metadata question) I'd like to stake my claim for another set of Ring Lardner shorts.

The Big Town is a collection of five short stories originally published in the Saturday Evening Post which was later published in a very slightly abridged book form (a couple paragraphs of recap text was removed from each of stories 2-5 which was no longer necessary since readers of the book compilation didn't have to wait months between each story).

The five shorts plus the preface are a hair short of the usual threshold for individual productions (39k words almost exactly) but the stories were conceived as a collection of shorts and not a novel, so it's already an omnibus of short stories, which as I understand makes that a little more permissible. Ideally, in these cases where Lardner published a series of connected shorts that were later published in book form, I'd like to produce them as separate ebooks and then when the time comes that I feel up to the enormous task of doing the larger overarching Short Fiction omnibus, it would end up containing all of the uncollected shorts.

Lardner short fiction spreadsheet for reference - this project would knock 5 items off of the list:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J6ZnT3_1DHHTCWyzfSKkAbIHQqrEz4AoUI7dQdz7668/

[Alex Cabal]

How tightly themed are these collections? While Big Town might be
approaching 40k words, Lose With a Smile is far short. Why wouldn't we
just roll all of these into the omnibus?

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[Jon Erdman]

I haven't read these yet (that's why I want to produce them after all!), so I'm working with what information I've been able to glean in summaries online. So my info may be incomplete, but high level, here's what I know:

The Big Town is a one continuous arc, but made up of five stories that could be read individually too. It's kind of like a serialized novel, but each part has its own individual storyline, so that each can be enjoyed on its own. The best parallel I can think of would be like a season of a modern TV show, where each episode is its own story but all together they form a singular larger narrative arc.

Same, presumably, with Lose With A Smile. That one follows the same epistolary format of the Jack Keefe stories and is tonally very similar, but follows a completely different cast of characters and is much, much shorter.

The Fred Gross Stories are objectively novel length altogether (I haven't tallied all of them up yet but they all appear to be roughly the same length so the final word count should be around 55k) but the connections between those are more tenuous than the connections between his other sets of connected stories. They all center on the same main character, but the stories are much less narratively linked, especially the last three.

He does have a set of travelogues that I believe would need to be produced as their own omnibus no matter what since they aren't fiction and clearly wouldn't belong in "short fiction". So if none of those collections of short stories sound like separate productions, maybe I could tackle the travelogues? If so, my question then is if we should just call it "Travelogues"? The first one, "My Four Weeks in France" details Lardner's time as a war correspondent in WW1, so "Travelogues", while technically accurate, doesn't exactly capture the mood of that story.

[Jon Erdman]

OK, so I actually skimmed some of the pieces that I wasn't totally sure how to classify.

I believe that "The Other Side" and "My Week in Cuba" should be regarded as fiction. They take the travelogue format, but they are very much satire of the travelogue genre full of half-truths and embellishments, which makes them fiction. I would imagine that we do *not* want to combine real travelogues together with mostly fictional ones into a single collection.

That means that My Four Weeks in France is Lardner's one and only truly nonfiction work. But it is short at only 31k words. I know we have some other nonfiction that is short (my first production, The Conscience of a Conservative was even shorter in fact). While I haven't read it yet, The D640 LOC call number makes it clear that it is definitely actual nonfiction.

Could I maybe do "My Four Weeks in France" as a standalone work? I think a diary-style travelogue of a war correspondent in WW1 qualifies as "timeless non-fiction". Is the length an issue for nonfiction since there are substantially shorter works of nonfiction on the site?

I could then circle back to the short fiction omnibus later, or if there are any groupings of stories that you feel justify their own separate release, I could tackle those first and then circle back to the larger omnibus.

[Alex Cabal]

OK, if it's absolutely his only real nonfiction work then we can do it
as its own ebook.

On 11/17/25 8:16 PM, Jon Erdman wrote:
> OK, so I actually skimmed some of the pieces that I wasn't totally sure
> how to classify.
>
> I believe that "The Other Side" and "My Week in Cuba" should be regarded
> as fiction. They take the travelogue format, but they are very much
> satire of the travelogue genre full of half-truths and embellishments,
> which makes them fiction. I would imagine that we do *not* want to
> combine real travelogues together with mostly fictional ones into a
> single collection.
>

> That means that /My Four Weeks in France/ is Lardner's one and only

> truly nonfiction work. But it is short at only 31k words. I know we have

> some other nonfiction that is short (my first production, /The
> Conscience of a Conservative/ was even shorter in fact). While I haven't

> > Scans: https://archive.org/details/cu31924021755685 <https://
> archive.org/details/cu31924021755685>
> > Transcription: https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/rl/
> bigtown.html <https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/rl/bigtown.html>

> > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/ <https://
> docs.google.com/spreadsheets/>

> > d/1J6ZnT3_1DHHTCWyzfSKkAbIHQqrEz4AoUI7dQdz7668/
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[Jon Erdman]

Yeah, that's his only true nonfiction that makes sense on SE. He has *tons* of nonfiction that's irrelevant and ephemeral because it was just news articles about the sports and political news of the day. My Four Weeks in France is the only true nonfiction he ever wrote that passes the SE test of "timeless".

I'll get a github repo set up later today and start up a new thread to get started on that.

I'll operate under the assumption that we want *all* of his remaining fiction in the general Short Fiction omnibus and I'll shoot for starting work on that omnibus sometime after January 1st as long as nobody else claims it by then (seems quite unlikely)

[Alex Cabal]

Let's put them all in the omnibus. You can group them under sub sections.

> > Scans: https://archive.org/details/cu31924021755685 <https://
> archive.org/details/cu31924021755685>
> > Transcription: https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/rl/bigtown.html

> > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/ <https://docs.google.com/
> spreadsheets/>

> > d/1J6ZnT3_1DHHTCWyzfSKkAbIHQqrEz4AoUI7dQdz7668/
> >
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[Jon Erdman]

Sounds good. I believe the only remaining candidate then in his entire corpus for an individual production then will be his play "June Moon" which is 23000 words and will become PD on January 1st as it was published in 1930.