MENCKEN, H. L. 1880-1956

Critic & editor

Great Debunker

During the 1920s few Americans matched Henry L. Mencken's influence as a writer and as an independent thinker. He was the decade's great debunker, aiming ridicule at the cowardice and ignorance of what he called the "booboisee."

"The Baltimore

Anti-Christ." Mencken graduated from the Baltimore Polytechnic School and became a reporter on the Baltimore Herald in 1899. He moved to the Baltimore Sun in 1906, and was associated with the Sunpapers as editor, correspondent, and columnist ("The Free Lance") for the rest of his working life. The force of Mencken's mind and the breadth of his learning enabled him to combine journalism with simultaneous careers as magazine editor, philologist, and literary-social critic. As editor of The Smart Set and The American Mercury, as well as a prolific contributor to other journals, Mencken had a strong influence on American iconoclasm during the 1920s. He denounced puritanism, censorship, fundamentalism, political corruption, and human folly, among other targets of opportunity. His powerful jeremiads earned him the titles of "The Sage of Baltimore" and "The Baltimore Anti-Christ." Even when most actively involved in New York publishing activities he commuted from his permanent residence in Baltimore.

And Nathan

With George Jean Nathan, Mencken edited The Smart Set from 1914 to 1923 and founded The American Mercury in 1924. Nathan's primary interest was the theater, and he was much less concerned with political and philosophical ideas than Mencken; but their combined attacks on the inadequacies and absurdities of American culture, along with Mencken's Germanophilia, led their admirers to coin the slogan "Mencken, Nathan, und Gott." As a literary critic, Mencken ridiculed both popular and academic taste while promoting the work of writers he regarded as truthful and courageous: particularly Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, Henrik Ibsen, and George Bernard Shaw. His support was crucial to the recognition of Dreiser as a major American novelist.

Prejudices and Philology

Mencken wrote more than thirty books on literature, philosophy, politics, and women, as well as autobiographies. His articles and essays were collected in six volumes correctly titled Prejudices. Mencken's major literary achievement was The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, first published as one volume in 1919 but revised and enlarged into three volumes during the next twenty-five years. This extraordinary philological work was accomplished by a self-educated independent scholar without academic or financial support.

Courage and Independence

Never pompous or self-righteous, Mencken was at his best when declaring the emperor's nudity. His courageous positions were often expressed by means of irony and hyperbole. He destroyed many of his targets by exposing them to ridicule. A man who acted on his own convictions, Mencken was unimpressed and unintimidated by power or numbers. He opposed America's involvement in both world wars; he attacked powerful religious and political leaders; he ridiculed the cultural poverty of the hinterlands—especially the South, which he labeled "the Sahara of the Bozart" (the desert of the beaux arts); he challenged censorship and risked jail by selling a copy of a banned issue of The American Mercury on the Boston Common in 1926; he took on all comers, including Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mencken consistently fought for American freedom, declaring that "no man can be dignified as long as he is afraid."

Hero

H. L. Mencken's reputation diminished during the 1930s and 1940s because his insistence on individualism and self-reliance was perceived as irresponsible or outdated by new generations committed to mass causes. Nonetheless, he was a culture hero in his own time; his work liberated American thought.

Sources:

Allison Bulsterbaum, H. L. Mencken: A Research Guide (New York: Garland, 1988);

William Manchester, Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken (New York: Harper, 1951);

H. L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor (New York: Knopf, 1992).

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

H. L. Mencken (Henry Louis Mencken) , 1880-1956, American editor, author, and critic, b. Baltimore, studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic. Probably America's most influential journalist, he began his career on the Baltimore Morning Herald at the age of 18, became editor of the Baltimore Evening Herald, and from 1906 until his death was on the staff of the Baltimore Sun or Evening Sun. He also played a key role in the production of two extremely influential national magazines. From 1914 to 1923 he was coeditor of the Smart Set with George Jean Nathan ; together they founded the American Mercury in 1924, and Mencken was its sole editor from 1925 to 1933.

Mencken's pungent, iconoclastic criticism and scathing invective, although aimed at all smugly complacent attitudes, was chiefly directed at what he saw as the ignorant, self-righteous, and overly credulous American middle class, members of which he dubbed Boobus americanus. His essays were collected in a series of six volumes, Prejudices (1919-27). In the field of philology he compiled a monumental and lively study, The American Language (1st ed. 1919; 4th ed. 1936; with supplements, 1946, 1948). Among his other works are George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905), In Defense of Women (1917), Treatise of the Gods (1930), and the autobiographical trilogy Happy Days, 1880-1892 (1940), Newspaper Days, 1899-1906 (1941), and Heathen Days, 1890-1936 (1943), collected in one volume in 1947. Mencken also fought against the strain of Puritanism in American literature and was an important literary champion of such writers as Theodore Dreiser , Sherwood Anderson , Sinclair Lewis , and Eugene O'Neill . His keen interest in and intelligent appraisal of 20th-century American letters are evident in the posthumously collected essays of H. L. Mencken on American Literature (2002).

Bibliography: See his letters (ed. by G. L. Forgue, 1961) and diary (ed. by C. A. Fecher, 1990); biographies by W. Manchester (1950), C. Angoff (1956), S. Mayfield (1968), C. Bode (1969), F. C. Hobson, Jr. (1994), and T. Teachout (2002); studies by D. C. Stenerson (1971), F. C. Hobson, Jr. (1974), C. Scruggs (1984), and E. A. Martin (1984); A. Bulsterbaum, H. L. Mencken: A Research Guide (1988).

Mencken, H. L. ( Henry Louis Mencken) (1880–1956), American journalist and critic, who as literary editor from 1908, then as co-editor, 1914–23 (with G. J. Nathan), of The Smart Set exercised a great influence on American taste, upholding the iconoclasm of writers as diverse as G. B. Shaw, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Zola, and Mark Twain. In 1924 he founded with Nathan the American Mercury in which he continued to satirize and goad his countrymen.

Mencken, H.L. ( Henry Louis) (1880–1956) US social critic. A brilliantly witty and ferociously savage critic of US middle-class culture, his influence was at its height while he was editor of the American Mercury (1924–33). In addition to his essays and journalism, he wrote a multi-volume study of The American Language (1919–48).