Lardner, Ring, Jr.

Lardner, Ring, Jr.

(1915– ) screenwriter; born in Chicago. He started out as a newspaper reporter and began writing Hollywood scripts in 1937. He won an Oscar for Woman of the Year (1942), but during the Communist witch hunts of the 1940s he was named one of the Hollywood Ten and sentenced to a year in jail. On his release, he was blacklisted and had to write scripts under pseudonyms; he regained his true name and reputation with his script for the film M*A*S*H (1970).