Mencken, H.L.

Mencken, H.L. (1880–1956), writer, editor, newspaperman.Throughout his life Henry Louis Mencken relished his role as a working newspaperman. Starting with the Baltimore Sun in 1906, he was associated with that paper for most of his life. He rose to literary prominence as coeditor (with George Jean Nathan) of The Smart Set (1914–1923) and The American Mercury (1924–1933). As editor and literary reviewer for these magazines, he championed numerous European and young American writers, including Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, frequently becoming involved in volcanic literary battles with the literary establishment and partisans of the older genteel tradition.

In 1925 Mencken covered the Scopes Trial challenging a Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution, and wrote a savagely satirical attack on William Jennings Bryan, who died shortly after testifying in the trial. An outspoken opponent of censorship, he successfully challenged a 1926 effort in Boston to suppress an issue of the American Mercury that included an article about a small‐town prostitute.

In a great many essays, gathered in a series of seven books entitled Prejudices, Mencken excoriated, with brilliant, savage humor, the low estate of American politics, the dreariness of popular culture, religious fundamentalism, Prohibition, and the smug, self‐satisfied life of what he called the booboisie. One of the best‐known figures of the 1920s, Mencken was a social and cultural critic of mordant wit and powerful literary skill.

In his years of greatest fame he wrote other successful books, including A Book of Burlesques (1916), In Defense of Women (1918), and Notes on Democracy (1926). An early work, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), helped introduce that German philosopher to American readers. Over several decades Mencken produced a scholarly three‐volume study of The American Language (1919–1936), written in a lucid nonacademic style. After the Depression of the 1930s his role as a literary and cultural firebrand faded, but he wrote, in a more mellow and charming manner, three volumes of autobiography: Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
See also Eighteenth Amendment; Fundamentalist Movement; Journalism; Literature: Since World War I; Literary Criticism; Magazines; Temperance and Prohibition; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Fred Hobson , Mencken; A Life, 1955.
Charles A. Fecher , Mencken: A Study of His Thought, 1978.

George H. Douglas