You Know Me Al: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

You Know Me Al, credited to Ring Lardner, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of 'You Know Me Al', by Ring Lardner. Read by Rick Rodstrom. Big, fat, dumb, lazy, vain, headstrong and cheap, Jack Keefe is a journeyman pitcher with the Chicago White Sox in the rowdy days of the Deadball Era, circa 1915, ruled by the likes of Ty Cobb and John McGraw. In You Know Me Al, we follow Jack Keefe's life on-field and off, via the letters Jack writes to his old chum Al in his home town of Bedford, Indiana. Ring Lardner was a Chicago sportswriter who covered the White Sox, and he brought an insider's knowledge of clubhouse life together with his biting wit and gift for the vernacular to create a comic gem in You Know Me Al. The six Jack Keefe stories that compose this volume were originally written as individual magazine articles, but the epistolary format made it easy to collect them into a single running narrative covering Jack's first two years in the Big Leagues. It isn't necessary to know baseball history to enjoy the book, which is as much about Jack's troubles with girlfriends, wives and babies as it is about the Chicago White Sox. For the baseball fan, however, this glimpse into a bygone era adds an extra layer of fascination. In any case, Lardner's portrait of the professional ballplayer as a dumb, drunken narcissist is as funny today as the day it was written. (Summary by Rick Rodstrom)

Recording facts

• Recording title: You Know Me Al
• Author credits: Ring Lardner
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 6
• Listed recording duration: 5:07:08

Catalogue topics

• baseball
• epistolary fiction
• Chicago White Sox
• Deadball Era

Track guide

1. 01 - A Busher's Letters Home — 48:35
2. 02 - The Busher Comes Back — 50:19
3. 03 - The Busher's Honeymoon — 49:36
4. 04 - A New Busher Breaks In — 54:04
5. 05 - The Busher's Kid — 51:40
6. 06 - The Busher Beats it Hence — 52:56

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.