Happy Days, 1880–1936 was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1940, and it astonished readers who knew Mencken only as the savage critic of American life. The book is a memoir of his Baltimore childhood — warm, affectionate, comic, and suffused with a nostalgia that the polemicist would never have permitted himself in public.
Mencken describes growing up in a prosperous German-American household in the 1880s: his cigar-manufacturer father, his long-suffering mother, the extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins who populated the row houses of Hollins Street. He writes about the pleasures of boyhood — swimming in the creek, building things, exploring the neighborhood, reading — with the same specificity he brings to everything, and the Baltimore he evokes is a vanished world: a city of gas lamps, horse-drawn carriages, neighborhood saloons, and front-stoop conversations.
The book’s charm lies in the gap between the autobiographer and his subject. The adult Mencken — worldly, cynical, magnificently opinionated — remembers the child Mencken with a tenderness he would have died rather than express in any other context. The prose is simpler than in the essays — less pyrotechnic, more conversational — and the overall effect is of a man who, for once, is not performing but simply remembering.
Collecting Happy Days
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1940): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Complete trilogy set (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days): $80–$250