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H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken (1880-1956) | |
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American literary critic, humorous journalist, essayist, whose comic skepticism about human progress, expressed with penetrating style, is a treasure for all interested in extravagant language. Mencken wrote - according to some estimations - 3 000 newspaper columns. During the 15-year period following World War I, Mencken set the standard for satire in his day, and his essays are still widely read. "Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth." (from 'The Libido for the Ugly', 1927) Henry Louis Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His grandfather had prospered in the tobacco business and his father, August, continued the family tradition. Mencken studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (1892-96) and then worked at his father's cigar factory. After his father died in 1899, Mencken was free to choose his own trade in the world. "I chose newspaper work without any hesitation whatever, and. save when the scent of a passing garbage-cart has revived my chemical libido, I have never regretted my choice," he later said. He was a reporter or editor for several Baltimore papers, among them Baltimore Morning Herald. He later joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun, for which he worked throughout most of his life. From 1916 to 1918 he was a war correspondent in Germany and in Russia. In 1903 Mencken published a collection of poems, but he considred GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS (1905) his "first real book". Mencken's study on the philosophy of Nietzsche (1908) was partly inspired by his own bourgeois German background. With Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx he shared a similar view on the role of religion in society - it was an tool for manipulating credulous masses. During World War I he was pro-German, and his A BOOK OF PREFACES (1917) was attacked by Stuart Sherman and others, who considered him unpatriotic. From 1914 to 1923 Mencken coedited with drama critic George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) the Smart Set. With Nathan he cofounded Parisienne, Saucy Stories, and Black Mask pulp magazines in the late 1910s, and cofounded and edited American Mercury (1923-33). In 1919 he published THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE, a guide to American expressions and idioms, which was a critical and popular success. It grew in the following years with each reissue and have had several supplements. In 1917 Mencken started as a literary adviser at Knopf publishers. From the mid-1920s his work became increasingly political, and soon Mencken gained his nationwide fame the reigning critic of manners and politics. Mencken was one of the most influential American critics in the 1920s. He helped such newcomers as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. As an editor he published manuscripts by such young writers as Eugene O'Neill and Dorothy Parker. He reviewed major works of Upton Sinclair, Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first published story appeared in the Smart Set. Mencken contributed to Chicago Tribune (1924-28), New York American (1934-35), and the Nation (1931-32). He was a columnist in Evening Mail in New York (1917-18), and 'The Free Lance' in Sunpapers (1919-41) in Baltimore. "The charm of journalism, to many of its practitioners, lies in the contacts it gives them with the powerful and eminent. They enjoy communion with men of wealth, high officers of state, and other such magnificoes. The delights of that privilege are surely not to be cried down, but it seems to me that I got a great deal more fun, in my days on the street, out of the lesser personages who made up the gaudy life of the city. A mayor was thrilling once or twice, but after that he tended to become a stuffed shirt, speaking platitudes out of a tin throat." (from 'Reflections on Journalism' in Twentieth-Century Essays, ed. by Ian Hamilton, 1999) In 1930 Mencken married the writer Sara Haardt, who was eighteen years younger than he. Before proposing Mencken had courted her for seven years, but during this period he had also continued his relationship with Marion Bloom, a country girl from Maryland, and had an affair Aileen Pringle, a silent-movie star. Sara Haardt was already very ill when Mencken married her. She died in 1935. In 1938 he abandoned his famous Evening Sun Monday articles, and at the beginning of World War II he gave up writing regularly fopr the Sun. Mencken's autobiographical trilogy started with HAPPY DAYS (1940), and was followed by NEWSPAPER DAYS (1941), and HEATHEN DAYS (1943). Last volume, MY LIFE AS AUTHOR AND EDITOR, appeared posthumously in 1993. Mencken suffered in 1949 a stroke which impaired his speech. He was also unable to read and write and did not remember the names of his friends. Mencken died of heart failure on January 29, 1956 in Baltimore, in the row house on Hollins Street where he had lived most of his life. In Minority Report (1956) he had written: "The imbeciles who have printed acres of comment on my books have seldom noticed the chief character of my style. It is that I write almost scientific precision - that my meaning is never obscure. The ignorant have often complained that my vocabulary is beyond them, but that is imply because my ideas cover a wider range that theirs do. Once they have consulted the dictionary they always know exactly what I intend to say." In his essays Mencken, who was in "permanent opposition", attacked on all aspects of American life, saving nothing, but he had an immense authority for a time. "I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five years," he once stated. He called immigrant ethnic groups uncivilized and out of touch with their own national culture, criticized the influence of the British, questioning whether intellectual life would exist at all in the U.S. were it not imported from abroad, assaulted the style of Thorstein Veblen, and mocked American education, literature ('thin and watery'), and such political figures as Woodrow Wilson (a 'pedagogue gone mashugga') and Calvin Coolidge, whose intelligence is compared to that of a 'cast-iron lawn dog'. Upon hearing of the death of Calvin Coolidge, he launched the often-repeated line 'How can they be sure?' "Moronia" was the name he sometimes used for the country he lived in. For further reading: The Man Mencken by Isaac Goldberg (1925); H.L. Mencken by Ernest Boyd (1925); The Irreverent Mr. Mencken by Edgar Kemler (1950); H.L. Mencken by Charles Angoff (1956); H.L. Mencken by William H. Nolte (1966); H.L. Mencken by Philip Wagner (1996); Mencken by Carl Bode (1969); H.L. Mencken by Douglas C. Stenerson (1971); H.L. Mencken by W.H.A. William (1977); H.L. Mencken by George H. Douglas (1978); Mencken: A Study of His Thought by C.A. Fecherr (1978); On Mencken, ed. by John Dorsey (1980); Disturber of the Peace by William Manchester (1986, original edition 1951); The Skeptic by Terry Teachout (2002) Selected works:
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