The once-influential Ring Lardner - still worth reading?

Ring Lardner is yet another writer from the 1920s-30s once very popular and now almost never read or discussed - I recently looked for any of his books in my town library and found none at all - but he was definitely on the every h.s. American lit syllabus 50 years ago. His story Haircut, included as one of 3 representatives from the 1920s alongside Anderson and Hemingway in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, today looks very simple and even naïve, which is probably why it influenced a lot of h.s. writers many years ago, including me: this story is entirely narrated by a barber giving an eponymous haircut to an out-of-towner and filling him in on the gossip of this small Michigan town --  we learn about an entire way of life in a provincial community, not unlike Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I read Lardner in h.s. partly because his book You Know Me, Al was one of the few literary works at the time about baseball, and I remember writing a (very bad) story modeled on Haircut that I think I called Taxi, in which a cab driver gives a long and dull narration to his fare, who it turns out is a baseball player trying to get to the park for the game. Anyway, what struck me reading Haircut many years after first encountering it is the incredible cruelty and meanness of the character the barber is describing - a terrible bully, misogynist, nasty man whom the barber and perhaps everyone in the town remembers as quite the "card." Reading the story now I see the all-too-evident irony that I don't think I saw in my youth - the guy in the chair, that is, we the readers, can't wait to get up and leave, and we wish we could tell the barber and all of his cronies to go to hell - though there's the sense that they all were terrified and humiliated by the Jim the bully and are too spineless to admit it, even now, This could be a la Flaubert considered a tale of provincial life. A central component of the story is the meanness of the tricks and teasing Jim plays on a young man who evidently has retardation or brain damage - an intriguing anticipation of IB Singer's Gimpel the Fool (could he have possibly read Lardner?), which much more sensitively and thoughtfully is narrated by the victim of town bullying and teasing.