Prejudices was published in six series by Alfred A. Knopf between 1919 and 1927, and together they constitute Mencken’s masterwork — the collected literary and cultural criticism of the man who, more than any other, defined the sensibility of the American 1920s.
The title is deliberately provocative: Mencken glories in his prejudices, presenting them not as weaknesses but as the honest expression of a man who has thought about things and reached conclusions. His prejudices are against democracy (which he considers mob rule), Puritanism (which he considers the national disease), the South (which he calls “the Sahara of the Bozart” — the desert of the beaux-arts), the professoriate (which he considers parasitic), and the American businessman (whom he calls “the booboisie”). His prejudices are for good writing, good beer, good music (he was a devoted amateur pianist), and intellectual honesty wherever it is found.
The essays cover an enormous range. The literary criticism includes devastating portraits of bad writers and generous appreciations of good ones (Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain); the social criticism ranges from attacks on censorship and Prohibition to analyses of the American character; the political commentary is radically anti-democratic without being conservative — Mencken despised the masses and the plutocrats with equal fervor.
The prose style is the heart of the matter. Mencken writes with a force, precision, and inventiveness that no American critic has matched. His sentences are built for combat — they advance, feint, and strike with the timing of a prize fighter — and his vocabulary is inexhaustible. He invents words when existing ones are insufficient, and his coinages have entered the language: “booboisie,” “Bible Belt,” “Boobus Americanus.”
Collecting Prejudices
First editions (Knopf, New York, 1919–1927): Six volumes in cloth.
Market values:
- First Series, first edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Complete six-volume first edition set: $500–$2,000
- Individual later volumes: $30–$100 each
- Prejudices: A Selection (1958, ed. James T. Farrell): $10–$25