Release date is 2026-01-12

Tim Miller, Dori Allard and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

The Big Town by Ring Lardner is a comic novel written in the early 20th century. It follows a fast-talking Midwestern husband, his socially eager wife Ella, and her sister Katie as they move to New York to “see life” and find Katie a husband, skewering Prohibition nightlife, easy money dreams, and status-chasing along the way. With slangy humor and sharp satire, it turns their hopes for quick success into a string of misadventures in hotels, apartments, and nightspots.

At the start of the novel, the narrator inherits money through his wife, tires of dull small-town life, and heads to New York with Ella and Katie in search of excitement and a match for Katie. On the train they meet Francis Griffin, a brash Wall Street type whose attentions drift toward Ella, prompting a boozy night out and, soon after, a furious confrontation that becomes the source of a newspaper “Hoosier cleans up in Wall Street” gag. The trio then splurge on a costly Riverside Drive apartment, hire an expensive cook, and fall in with Trumbull, a vain, deep-pocketed neighbor whose pushy courtship of Katie backfires; when she co-opts his chauffeur and learns the man has a family, they flee back to a hotel. Seeking relief from summer heat, they decamp to a Long Island resort where the narrator lampoons the staid, status-obsessed scene and the women’s struggle to meet anyone. Eager to make social headway, Ella sets her sights on the aloof Lady Perkins, and the narrator mischievously engineers an introduction by inventing a dog ailment and delivering a bogus “remedy,” to the astonishment of his wife and sister-in-law. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920