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Write Like Ryan Holiday? Maybe Not.
Then again, H.L. Mencken made a killing by writing for “the morons”
There used to be writing that was “middlebrow.” You’d find it in urbane and smart publications that were lower than academia and fine writing (highbrow) and higher than sports columnists and dimestore novels (lowbrow).
It was always a limited market. When Henry Fowler self-published his own set of essays, it didn’t do well because, said his biographer G. G. Coulton, it was “neither good enough nor bad enough for popular success.”
It has long been the case: If you want to make good money, you can’t limit yourself to middlebrow pieces, hence H.L. Mencken, as co-editor of The Smart Set, siphoned off less satisfactory submissions into a magazine for “the morons.” He made a killing:
Parisienne Monthly Magazine, a fifteen-cent pulp devoted to trashy short stories and novelettes set in France, became so successful that they launched two similar publications, Saucy Stories (in 1916) and Black Mask (in 1920). All were edited anonymously and with the utmost contempt — Mencken referred to them as “the louse magazines” . . . [They later] sold their interest in all three magazines for $60,000" (about $1,000,000 in 2023 dollars). Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002), 122.
