MENCKEN, H(enry) L(ouis)

MENCKEN, H(enry) L(ouis) [1880–1956].American journalist and social critic, born in Baltimore, Maryland, and educated at a local private school and the Baltimore Polytechnic. He is remembered chiefly for his monumental work The AMERICAN LANGUAGE (AL, 1919), which was instrumental in establishing the scholarly study of English in the US. A lifelong resident of Baltimore, Mencken began writing for the city's newspapers in 1899 and continued doing so for most of his career. He was an iconoclast, noted for cynically witty essays in literary, social, and political criticism. Among his favourite targets were religion, the cultural barrenness of the American South, the motives of politicians, and an English cultural tradition in America that he identified as puritanism.

Mencken was an autodidact whose interest in language led him to read widely and to collect citations of all aspects of AMERICAN ENGLISH. His goal was to make the study of language accessible to the general reader. The 1st edition of AL claimed that Americans spoke a separate language of their own making that they could take pride in, not an imperfect imitation of the language of England. The language that he described as American was full of regional variation, new words borrowed from immigrant groups, figurative usage from such institutions as railroading and baseball, jaunty slang, and raucous vulgarisms. Americans in the era following World War I found in AL verification of their cultural independence as the US became an international power.

Incorporating new information from both scholars and general readers, Mencken brought out revised and enlarged editions of AL in 1921 and 1923. In 1925, he was instrumental in founding the journal American Speech, which he hoped would be sold at corner news-stands. Though the journal never attained such popularity, Mencken's publications and his personal encouragement influenced a number of scholars to turn their attention to the study of the English language in America. The 4th edition of AL (1936), along with two supplements (1945, 1948), is an unrivalled compendium of information about English in the US and its historical development before the mid-century. In later editions, Mencken abandoned his earlier thesis that BrE and AmE were developing as separate languages in favour of the view that they were merging, but with American as the dominant partner. See AMERICANISM, AMERICAN LANGUAGE, EDUCATED ENGLISH, GENERAL AMERICAN.