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Edited and annotated by H.L.M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books--the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong--but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all. Readers will find edification and amusement in his estimates of a variety of Americans--Woodrow Wilson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Roosevelt I and Roosevelt II, James Gibbons Huneker, Rudolph Valentino, Calvin Coolidge, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, and Walt Whitman. Those musically inclined will enjoy his pieces on Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner, and there is material for a hundred controversies in his selections on Joseph Conrad, Thorstein Veblen, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky.… (more)
User reviews
Mencken, I am convinced, was a genius whose writings will live long even into the next century. His writing is the only one that I feel compelled to read aloud to my wife, arms raised in excitement and for emphasis, daring her to contradict the glory of his prose.
What contemporary American writer can match his mastery? I've read a lot, but I can't give even an approximation. His style is elegant, distinctively American, and a joy to read. Something like listening to a singer who you know has an absolute control of her material, a voice that does exactly what she intends, and the aesthetic sense of an angel.
"Living with a dog is messy-like living with an ideaiist."