This early work by Ring Lardner was originally published in 1924 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'How to Write Short Stories' is a non-fiction, educational work on the art of creative writing. Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan in 1885. He studied engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, but did not complete his first semester. In 1907, Lardner obtained his first job as journalist with the South Bend Times. Six years later, he published his first successful book, 'You Know Me Al', an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by 'Jack Keefe', a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. A huge hit, the book earned the appreciation of Virginia Woolf and others. Lardner was a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers of the Jazz Age. He was published by Maxwell Perkins, who also served as Fitzgerald's editor, and served as the model for the tragic character Abe North in Fitzgerald's last completed novel, 'Tender Is the Night' (1934).