H.L. Mencken

Henry Louis Mencken (12 September 1880 – 29 January 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and scholar of American English who was, during the 1920s, the most powerful and the most entertaining literary critic in the United States — a man whose prose style, intellectual pugnacity, and sheer joy in combat made him the dominant cultural voice of the Jazz Age and one of the most distinctive writers America has produced.

Early Career

Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a prosperous German-American family. He began working at the Baltimore Morning Herald in 1899, at the age of eighteen, and remained a journalist — primarily at the Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun — for the rest of his working life. He never attended university, a fact he wore as a badge of honour.

He became literary editor of the Smart Set magazine in 1908 (co-editing with George Jean Nathan from 1914) and founded The American Mercury in 1924, which became the most influential magazine of the decade.

The Critic

Mencken’s critical essays — collected in six volumes of Prejudices (1919–1927) — attacked everything he despised about American culture: Puritanism, prohibition, religious fundamentalism, the genteel literary tradition, academic mediocrity, and what he called the “booboisie” — the vast, credulous, uncultured American public. His style was muscular, allusive, mocking, and brilliantly funny. He could demolish a reputation in a sentence: he called Warren G. Harding’s prose “a string of wet sponges” and dismissed Thoreau as “a valetudinarian who preferred sitting on a log and talking about it to doing anything about it.”

But Mencken was also a generous champion of writers he admired. He was among the first American critics to recognise the genius of Theodore Dreiser, and his advocacy helped establish Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy as major works. He championed Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and the European modernists when the American literary establishment was still suspicious of them.

A Book of Prefaces (1917)

Mencken’s first major critical work attacked the “Puritanism as a Literary Force” that he believed was strangling American literature. The book is a polemical masterpiece — a furious, learned, and funny assault on censorship, gentility, and the moralistic criticism that demanded literature serve as a Sunday-school lesson.

The Scopes Trial (1925)

Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee — in which a schoolteacher was tried for teaching evolution — was his most famous piece of journalism. His dispatches from Dayton, dripping with contempt for the fundamentalist prosecution and its star witness, William Jennings Bryan, helped shape the national narrative of the trial as a conflict between science and superstition, modernity and backwardness. His obituary of Bryan — published the day after Bryan died — is one of the most savage pieces of American journalism ever written.

The American Language (1919–1948)

Mencken’s most enduring work is The American Language, a massive, meticulously researched study of the ways in which American English had diverged from British English. First published in 1919, the book went through four editions (1921, 1923, 1936) and two enormous supplements (1945, 1948), growing from a single volume into a three-volume encyclopaedia of American speech, slang, nomenclature, and pronunciation.

The book is both a work of serious scholarship — Mencken corresponded with linguists, etymologists, and dialectologists across the country — and a characteristically entertaining piece of Mencken prose, full of anecdotes, digressions, and observations about American life.

The Autobiographical Trilogy

Mencken’s three volumes of autobiography — Happy Days, 1880–1936 (1940), Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941), and Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943) — are among the most delightful memoirs in American literature. Written in a warm, nostalgic tone quite different from his combative criticism, they evoke the Baltimore of Mencken’s youth with Dickensian richness and detail.

Later Years and Controversy

Mencken’s influence waned after the 1920s. His libertarian individualism, which had been thrilling during the conformist 1920s, seemed callous during the Depression, and his suspicion of Roosevelt alienated much of his audience. His posthumously published diary revealed attitudes toward Jews and African Americans that shocked many admirers and complicated his legacy.

Mencken and Nietzsche

Mencken’s first book, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), was one of the earliest studies of Nietzsche in English. His reading of Nietzsche was selective and idiosyncratic — he took what he wanted (the critique of democratic mediocrity, the celebration of individual excellence, the contempt for slave morality) and ignored what didn’t suit him (the metaphysics, the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the later madness). But the Nietzschean inheritance shaped everything Mencken wrote: his aristocratic disdain for the masses, his hatred of Puritanism and Christianity, his belief that culture was the province of a superior minority. Whether this makes him a bracing corrective to democratic sentimentality or a dangerous elitist has been debated ever since.

Legacy

Mencken remains one of the most quotable and one of the most problematic figures in American letters. At his best — in the Prejudices, in The American Language, in the autobiographies — he is among the finest prose stylists in American literary history. His influence on American journalism and criticism is incalculable. Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolfe all acknowledged Mencken as a stylistic model, and the tradition of the American literary journalist as cultural provocateur runs directly through him.

Collecting Mencken

The American Language (1919, Knopf) in first edition is the primary Mencken collectible. The Prejudices series (1919–1927, Knopf) in first editions with dust jackets are sought. Mencken published prolifically and his books are generally available, but association copies and inscribed items command significant premiums.