H.L. Mencken

[Byron In Exile]

yeah, yeah.
You need to take your activity to another rumpus room, that's all.

You have a lot of nerve insinuating witchburning, Mister Counts-His-Money Man. I AM someone who would have beenburned, while YOU are just another of the millions of bourgeois limpdicks with a wallet where his brain should be.


Your moral code is in plenty effect all over the fucking world. This forum was once a respite from beancounters and middlemen. If you don't want to talk to the regulars, what are you doing here? Seriously, think about it.

I somehow missed this.

What an utter douche you present yourself as.

 

[Byron In Exile]

Be honest; you aren't quoting his writing in this thread, only his political quips. And only the ones that anyone could get via google.

Look at the first post in this thread:

Baltimore, April 13, 1945

The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt's unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her "My Day." Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed "Nation Mourns." The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, "The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time." This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt's greatness in all seriousness.

I typed that from Mencken's diary, putting my glasses on and taking them off, because I can read books better with them, but I can read the screen better without them...

You're no author. That much is certain.

 

[trysail]

Excerpted from:

MENCKENIANA, A Schimpflexikon
Expurgated Edition
New York, New York 1928.

NOTE​

This collection is not exhaustive, but an effort has been made to keep it representative. The original materials would fill many volumes: they include hundreds of savage articles and newspaper editorials, and a number of whole pamphlets. During the single year 1926 more than 500 separate editorials upon the sayings and doings of Mr. Mencken were printed in the United States, and at least four-fifths of them were unfavorable. Himself given to somewhat acidulous utterance, he has probably been denounced more vigorously and at greater length than any other American of his time, not even excepting Henry Ford, Robert M. LaFollette, Clarence Darrow, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Here there is room only to offer some salient specimens of this anti-Mencken invective— mainly single sentences or phrases, torn from their incandescent context. Some were chosen for their wit— for there are palpable hits among them!—, some for their blistering ferocity, and some for their charming idiocy. The rest of the material awaits the literary resurrection men of another and perhaps less indignant day.
-THE PUBLISHER

Chapters

• Zoölogical
  "This maggot, this ghoul of new-made graves, this buzzard!"
  -Eugene L. Pearce, in the Tampa Times.
  
• Genealogical
  "Mr. Mencken did not degenerate from an ape, but from an ass. And in the process of 'revolution' the tail was eliminated, the ears became shorter and the hind parts smaller; but the ability to bray was increased, intensified, amplified and otherwise assified about one million times."
  - J. B. Tedder, in the Chattanooga News.
  
• Pathological
  "H. L. Mencken says the Liberty Bell episode was a myth. That man just naturally can't stand for anything that is more cracked than he is himself."
  - The Los Angeles Record
  
• Freudian Diagnosis
  "Mr. Mencken, that American Loud-Speaker, is suffering from a serious superiority complex."
  - The Queen ( London ).
  
• Penalogical
  "Mencken, with his filthy verbal hemorrhages, is so low down in the moral scale, so damnably dirty, so vile and degenerate, that when his time comes to die it will take a special dispensation from Heaven to get him into the bottomost pit of Hell."
  - The Jackson ( Miss. ) News.
  
• As A Critic
  "Mr. Mencken is a typical Hun in his criticism."
  - The Los Angeles Times.
  
• As An Artist
  "Mr. Mencken is no writer at all, but a brick factory."
  - The New Republic.
  
• As An Evangelist
  "Mencken is frankly a diabolist."
  - The Manchester ( N.H. ) Union.
  
• As An American
  "A British toady."
  - The Lowell ( Mass. ) Sun.
  
• As An Intellectual
  "In his glorious upward progress he acquired instead of the gray matter placed in the skulls of Tennesseans by the Almighty, a composite of slime, mould, bunk, miasma, decay, skunk cabbage, devil's snuff, flapdoodle and Hamburger cheese, blended in minor proportions with razor extract, stump water and valerian. So biggon, sooey, scat, shoo!"
  - Nannie H. Chesnutt, in the Nashville Tennessean.
  
• As A Journalist
  "H. L. Mencken thinks journalism is in a low estate. It sure is wherever Mencken touches it."
  - The Council Bluffs ( Iowa ) Nonpareil.
  
• As A Truth-Seeker
  
• As An Editor
  
• As A Statesman
  "A radical crack-brain."
  - The Huntington ( W. Va. ) Herald-Dispatch.
  
• As A Voluptuary
  "The Menckens are accustomed to trafficking in morasses of racy French literature. They have attained that peak of rarefied highbrowism where the palate quickens only upon highly-seasoned eroticism."
  - The Louisville Courier-Journal.
  
• As A Scoundrel
  
• Kosher Or Terefah?
  "Mencken is connected with the New York World, the attitude of which toward Romanism and Rum the reader should know full well. From his name, he seems to be a Jew, or at least a German, and recently in an Alabama daily he was sneering at Genesis.
  - The Alabama Christian Advocate.
  
• Ex-Cathedra
  "One H. L. Mencken, whose name sounds like that of a German, Polish or Russian Jew, said to be foreign-born and a product of the schools of Germany, has sneeringly called the South the Bible Belt."
  - THE REV. JAMES M. GLENN, D.D., in the Birmingham ( Ala. ) Christian Advocate.
  
• Counter-Offensive
  "I do not believe that all the iconoclastic mouthings of H. L. Mencken can weigh as feathers against the gold of a single, little, undernourished, underprivileged or crippled child, made happier by the work of the Lions."
  - PROFESSOR ENEST C. MARRINER, of Colby College, Waterville, Maine.
  
• Winces Of The Called
  
• The Voice Of The Motherland
  
• Miscellaneous Elegancies
  "H. L. Mencken, instead of taking a page ad like the piles cure manufacturers or the fly paper venders or the corn plaster makers, simply says something sufficiently shocking or silly to be quoted."
  - The Nashville Tennessean
  
• Verdicts In Brief
  "A SMART Aleck who has become a member of Phi Beta Kappa."
  - Hearst's Chicago Herald-Examiner.
  
  "A Baltimore Babbitt."
  - O. O. McINTYRE
  

Soli Deo gloria!


​

 

[trysail]

Mencken has done more for the national letters than any man alive.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald​

 

[trysail]

A Book of Prefaces can now be read in its entirety online.


The Gutenberg Project
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19355/19355-h/19355-h.htm

A BOOK OF PREFACES

By H. L. MENCKEN

PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY
ALFRED · A · KNOPF


COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

Published September, 1917
Second edition, 1918
Third edition, August, 1920
Reprinted, January, 1922


CONTENTS

Preface to the Fourth Edition
I. Joseph Conrad
II. Theodore Dreiser
III. James Huneker
IV. Puritanism as a Literary Force
Index​

...For all our professed delight in and capacity for jocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit—Ambrose Bierce—and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. Our great humourists, including even Mark Twain, have had to take protective colouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing ethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at the stupidities of the Puritan majority, but at the evidences of lessening stupidity in the anti-Puritan minority. In other words, they have done battle, not against, but for Philistinism—and Philistinism is no more than another name for Puritanism. Both wage a ceaseless warfare upon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, and from the drama to the dance—the first because it holds beauty to be a mean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be distracting and corrupting.

Mark Twain, without question, was a great artist; there was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with the great artists of the Renaissance. But his nationality hung around his neck like a millstone; he could never throw off his native Philistinism. One ploughs through "The Innocents Abroad" and through parts of "A Tramp Abroad" with incredulous amazement. Is such coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the best humour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? Is it really the mark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "Lohengrin"? Is Titian's chromo of Moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded as the noblest picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Latin Christianity, after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of the knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not a civilized man, disbelieving in it, still find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling history, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, the charm of its gorgeous and melancholy loveliness? In the presence of all beauty of man's creation—in brief, of what we roughly call art, whatever its form—the voice of Mark Twain was the voice of the Philistine. A literary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that lifted him, in "Huckleberry Finn" to kinship with Cervantes and Aristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that he seems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good and the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. The literary criticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivial and ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward such romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing that interested him in Shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but the absurd theory that Bacon wrote his plays. Had he been born in France (the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a Puritan village of the American hinterland, I venture that he would have conquered the world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of the Puritan smugness and cocksureness, the Puritan distrust of new ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself, and the full peer of the true and the good...

 

[trysail]

The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty—and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies. It is, indeed, only the exceptional man who can even stand it. The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

-H. L. Mencken
Baltimore Evening Sun
February 12, 1923​

 

[trysail]

For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.

—H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

​

 

[sr71plt]

Hasn't even noticed he's been quoting to himself for two years.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Given the tediousness of both H.L. and his moldering fans, that's hardly a surprise. Progress is made in all areas of human endeavor one funeral at a time.

 

[trysail]

What amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.

—Richard Wright


​

 

[trysail]

Mencken’s descriptions of these wondrous clowns [i.e., politicians] are still a delight because, though the originals are long since erased from the collective ‘memory’ of the United States of Amnesia, the types persist.

— Gore Vidal​

 

[trysail]

Baltimore, April 13, 1945

The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt's unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her "My Day." Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed "Nation Mourns." The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, "The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time." This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt's greatness in all seriousness.

Requiescat in pace.



​

 

[trysail]

http://www.loa.org/images/volumecovers/153x195/1598533088.jpg

http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=407&section=toc

​

It's FINALLY happened (thank god; it's long overdue).

If you have never read H. L. Mencken's semi-autobiographical "Days" trilogy, you're lucky and I envy you— you've got a treat in store.

Library of America books are lovely. They're beautifully crafted, small enough to be held comfortably in one hand and printed on acid-free paper.

Mencken was the best prose writer of the 20th century. These stories are laced with intelligence, erudition and rollicking humor. There are stories that left me convulsed in laughter when I first encountered them many decades ago.


Table of Contents:

Happy Days 1880–1892
Preface
I.Introduction to the Universe
II.The Caves of Learning
III.Recollections of Academic Orgies
IV.The Baltimore of the Eighties
V.Rural Delights
VI.The Head of the House
VII.Memorials of Gormandizing
VIII.The Training of a Gangster
IX.Cops and Their Ways
X.Larval Stage of a Bookworm
XI.First Steps in Divinity
XII.The Ruin of an Artist
XIII.In the Footsteps of Gutenberg
XIV.From the Records of an Athlete
XV.The Capital of the Republic
XVI.Recreations of a Reactionary
XVII.Brief Gust of Glory
XVIII.The Career of a Philosopher
XIX.Innocence in a Wicked World
XX.Strange Scenes and Far Places 


Newspaper Days 1899–1906
Preface
I.Allegro Con Brio
II.Drill for a Rookie
III.Sergeant’s Stripes
IV.Approach to Lovely Letters
V.Fruits of Diligence
VI.The Gospel of Service
VII.Scent of the Theatre
VIII.Command
IX.Three Managing Editors
X.Slaves of Beauty
XI.The Days of the Giants
XII.The Judicial Arm
XIII.Recollections of Notable Cops
XIV.A Genial Restauranteur
XV.A Girl from Red Lion, P.A.
XVI.Scions of the Bogus Nobility
XVII.Aliens, but Not Yet Enemies
XVIII.The Synthesis of News
XIX.Fire Alarm
XX.Sold Down the River


Heathen Days 1890–1936
Preface
I.Downfall of a Revolutionary [1890]
II.Memoirs of the Stable [1891]
III.Adventures of a Y.M.C.A. Lad [1894]
IV.The Educational Process [1896]
V.Finale to the Rogue’s March [1900]
VI.Notes on Palaeozoic Publicists [1902]
VII.The Tone Art [1903]
VIII.A Master of Gladiators [1907]
IX.A Dip into Statecraft [1912]
X.Court of Honor [1913]
XI.A Roman Holiday [1914]
XII.Winter Voyage [1916]
XIII.Gore in the Caribbees [1917]
XIV.Romantic Intermezzo [1920]
XV.Old Home Day [1922]
XVI.The Noble Experiment [1924]
XVII.Inquisition [1925]
XVIII.Vanishing Act [1934]
XIX.Pilgrimage [1934]
XX.Beaters of Breasts [1936]


Days Revisited: Mencken’s Unpublished Commentary
Preface
Notes on Happy Days
Notes on Newspaper Days
Notes on Heathen Days

Chronology
Note on the Texts
Note on the Illustrations
Notes
Index
 - See more at: http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=407&section=toc#sthash.EWzk6fFI.dpuf

​

 

[trysail]

"The most sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages."

-H. L. Mencken
(describing Americans)
​

​

 

[TxRad]

Hasn't even noticed he's been quoting to himself for two years.

It's now four years later and he's still doing it. No one cares but him but he's got to keep it up or he'll burst.

 

[trysail]

Baltimore, April 13, 1945

The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man." There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt's unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her "My Day." Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed "Nation Mourns." The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, "The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time." This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt's greatness in all seriousness.

Eternal.

 

[Hypoxia]

This message is hidden because trysail is on your ignore list. Whatever.

Still dragging this shit out over the years? Why not move on to Will Rogers or Mort Sahl or Triumph or PJ O'Rourke? Is much trenchant political punditry out there. Whip it out.

My fave PJ: "Republicans say government doesn't work. Then they get elected and prove it." My fave Barbara Jordan: "The difference between Democrats and Republicans is like the difference between syphilis and gonorrhea." And Will Rogers: "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." Substituting GOP, that would be Ted Cruz's line now.

Anyway, old FDR-hate is old. Doesn't matter that USA was the only western nation NOT to succumb to an overtly fascist tyrrany between wars, largely due to FDR's New Deal which forestalled revolution. Notice who hates that the USA remained intact from the War of Southern Treason through the Cold War. Confederate traitors; pro-Nazi traitors; Communist traitors. See a pattern?

EDIT: My apologies. I didn't realize this wasn't in the Politics forum.

 

[trysail]

The Impossible H.L. Mencken
by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
New York, New York 1991.



from the Forward
by Gore Vidal:

... A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Mencken is a nice antidote. Politically, he is often right but seldom correct by today's stern standards. In a cheery way, he dislikes most minorities and if he ever had a good word to say about the majority of his countrymen, I have yet to come across it. Recently, when his letters were published, it was discovered that He Did Not Like the Jews, and that he had said unpleasant things about them not only as individuals but In General, plainly the sign of a Hitler-Holocaust enthusiast. So shocked was everyone that even the New York Review of Books' unofficial de-anti-Semitiser, Garry Wills (he salvaged Dickens, barely), has yet to come to his aid with An Explanation. But in Mencken's private correspondence, he also snarls at black Americans, Orientals, Britons, women, and WASPs, particularly the clay-eating Appalachians, whom he regarded as subhuman. But private irritability is of no consequence when compared to what really matters, public action...

***​

... Matthew Arnold wrote that a "style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age." Mencken certainly said what he had to say about the age that he had been assigned to. When asked why, if he could find nothing to "revere" in the United States, he lived there, he replied, "Why do men go to zoos?"

Religion as generally practiced by the Americans of his day, he saw as a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates. He himself was a resolute breacher of the Great Wall, and to the extent that some civilization has got through, he is one of the few Americans that we can thank. Plainly, so clear and hard a writer would not be allowed in the mainstream press of today, and those who think that they would like him back would be the first to censor and censure him.

As for Mencken himself, he wrote his own epitaph in 1921 for The Smart Set: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." I realize that he has, viciously, used the G-word and, even worse, the long-since-banned H-word. But there he is. And there we are, lucky we.
​

​

 

[Noor]

AND you and I

 

[hoo_hoo_boo]

So Mencken is like CJDennis?Perhaps not as funny though.

 

[trysail]

...That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered
where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken.
Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes
and dislikes from Mencken...

​

-Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
New York, N.Y. 1926
​

​

 

[trysail]

Today is Mencken's 136th birthday.


http://wist.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/H-L-Mencken-epitaph.jpg

He was a one-off. The world will not see another like him.



​

 

[Kantarii]

Deleted

 

[trysail]

Wealth

Any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

-H. L. Mencken
​

​

 

[The_Trouvere]

H.L. Mencken's writings during the 1920's still seem fresh and amusing. His targets were the targets who still arouse the ire of contemporary liberals: they were rich Republicans and Protestant Fundamentalists.

During the New Deal he revealed him self to be an embittered plutocrat, angry that his taxes were raised.

He died too late.