Prejudices

Prejudices, six series of critical essays by H.L. Mencken, published in 1919, 1920, 1922, 1924, 1926, and 1927. A selected volume appeared in 1927.

These frankly biased, raucous effusions, on a wide variety of literary and cultural topics, won Mencken both devoted followers and indignant opponents during the 1920s. First published in The Smart Set, The American Mercury, the New York Evening Mail, and the Boston Evening Star, they exhibit their author's bold iconoclasm, vital prose, and crusading zeal against university education, equalitarianism, puritanical morality, sentimentalism, religion, the New Humanism, poetry, and business‐class culture. Through these essays, he inspired and campaigned for critical American fiction, championing Dreiser, Cabell, and Sinclair Lewis, and pressed his enthusiasms for such writers as Clemens, Poe, Huneker, and Bierce, and for the music of the great German composers. Besides his mélange of classicism and journalistic audacity, he was noted for his ability at destructive criticism, typified in The Sahara of the Bozart, attacking the sterility of Southern culture; Bryan, ridiculing the statesman's provincialism and Fundamentalism; Professor Veblen, decrying the obscure style and allegedly empty generalizations of the economist; and The National Letters, asserting that American literature is on a mediocre level because of the absence of a cultural background and a civilized aristocracy.