Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1941, continuing the autobiography where Happy Days left off. The book covers Mencken’s apprenticeship as a journalist — his first day at the Baltimore Morning Herald at age eighteen, his rapid rise from police reporter to city editor, and his transition to the Baltimore Sun, where he would spend the rest of his career.
The book is the finest memoir of American journalism ever written. Mencken describes the newsroom of 1899 with the relish of a man who found his true home: the cigar smoke, the copy boys, the editors, the drunks, the deadline pressure, the thrill of getting the story. He covers fires, murders, political conventions, and sporting events, and each assignment is recounted as a small adventure — a picaresque tale of a young man loose in a city that was endlessly entertaining to anyone with eyes to see.
The journalists Mencken portrays are a rogue’s gallery of eccentrics, alcoholics, and failed geniuses — men who could write beautifully and lived badly, who knew everything about the city and nothing about their own lives. Mencken writes about them with the same affectionate comedy he brought to his Baltimore childhood, and the book has the quality of a love letter — not to journalism as an institution but to the particular world of turn-of-the-century newspaper work, which was already vanishing when Mencken wrote about it.
Collecting Newspaper Days
First edition (Knopf, New York, 1941): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $8–$20