{"product_id":"2026200014596-secondhand-you-know-me-al-a-bushers-letters","title":"You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBefore there was Babe Ruth's legend or Field of Dreams' romanticism, there was Jack Keefe — the swaggering, semi-literate rookie pitcher from Indiana whose hilariously self-deluded letters home to his friend Al form the backbone of Ring W. Lardner's You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters, a comic masterpiece that strips America's pastime of its mythology and replaces it with something far more honest and enduring. Set in the early days of professional baseball, the novel chronicles Keefe's misadventures across the major leagues, his disastrous marriages, his financial follies, and his unshakeable belief in his own greatness — a belief that the reader quickly learns to trust far less than he does.\n\nLardner, one of the great American satirists of the early twentieth century, wields the epistolary form with surgical precision, allowing Keefe's own words to expose the vanity, ignorance, and hapless ambition that define his character without a single authorial intrusion. First serialised in The Saturday Evening Post from 1914, the novel was celebrated by contemporaries including Virginia Woolf and H.L. Mencken, who recognised in Lardner's vernacular prose a radical and uniquely American literary voice. Beneath the broad comedy of a lovable fool navigating a world he barely understands lies a sharp and unsentimental portrait of working-class aspiration and self-deception — leaving the reader to wonder, long after the final letter is signed, whether Jack Keefe ever truly knew himself at all.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49210289488091,"sku":"2026200014596-SECONDHAND","price":15.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/6713e8b5-5e98-418a-8f5d-a2663fec183f.png?v=1788268938","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200014596-secondhand-you-know-me-al-a-bushers-letters","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}