Member-only story
Getting to Know H.L. Mencken
I occasionally surrender to a Mencken spree. It’s something I’ve been doing since the early 1990s when I bought my first Mencken books: three cheap paperback editions of Mencken essays that I found at The Dawn Treader Bookstore in Ann Arbor.
I’ve recently been reading the essays, articles, and reviews he repackaged and issued in the six-volume set, Prejudices, as well as the writings from the Second Mencken Chrestomathy that Mencken biographer Terry Teachout edited in the early 1990s.
The Sage of Baltimore was the biggest writer in the 1920s, which was “peak literary culture,” immediately before the Golden Age of Radio in the 1930s.
Print was entertainment. Few entertained as well as Mencken.
And he entertained and entertained and entertained. Toward the end of his life, he speculated he wrote well over 5,000,000 words.
No finer prose has been written by an American
Mencken assumed that his works would have a short shelf life, since he wrote mostly about the “portentous” issues of his day. “Period pieces,” we might call them.
But no. They’ve endured. Why? It’s a mystery (Teachout: “baffling”).
Maybe it’s because, in Teachout’s words, “no finer prose has been written by an American.”…
