Heinz succinctly put it: Lardner was “the best of us.” When he died in 1960, at the age of 47, he was widely recognized as an unsurpassed observer of sports, through his long-running weekly column in Newsweek 1 and a variety of freelance pieces for The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, True, and Sport.
In the grand era of sports that spanned the middle of the 20th century, few writers were more revered by their contemporaries than John Lardner.
