I thought Ring Lardner’s father had been a committed communist. One of them was a sports writer. I’m confused.
BTW, is anyone surprised that Mr. Stiers is of the homosexual persuasion? That would be news.
Ring Lardner Sr. was a very funny short story writer who started writing about sports. His most famous book, You Know Me Al is about a baseball player. Most of the rest of the extended Lardner family were writers of one sort or another and generally on the left, though I doubt Old Ring Sr. had been very political.
His son, Ring Lardner Jr., was a screenwriter who'd been a Communist in the 1930s and one of the "Hollywood Ten" who refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1940s. He was blacklisted until the 1960s. He wrote the movie M*A*S*H.
H. Richard Hornberger wrote the novel Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors under the name Richard Hooker. I gather from the thread that he was pretty conservative and didn't agree with everything in the film and the television series.