H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: The First, Second, and Third Series
(H.L. Manken used his acerbic wit and intelligence to atta...)
H.L. Manken used his acerbic wit and intelligence to attack some of the hypocrisies in his times in one of the most engaging tracts written on the subjects. Including some of his most famous works like "The National Letters", "The Sahara of the Bozart", and "The Allied Arts", the first three Series are must own works that should be enjoyed by anyone looking at the social and political progress of American society through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "lan...)
With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Menckens death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.
In the second volume of his autobiography, Mencken recalls his years as a young reporter.
A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial
("The native American Voltaire, the enemy of all puritans,...)
"The native American Voltaire, the enemy of all puritans, the heretic in the Sunday school, the one-man demolition crew of the genteel tradition."
Alistair Cooke
Fiercely intelligent, scathingly honest, and hysterically funny, H.L. Menckens coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial so galvanized the nation that it eventually inspired a Broadway play and the classic Hollywood movie Inherit the Wind.
Mencken s no-nonsense sensibility is still exciting: his perceptive rendering of the courtroom drama; his piercing portrayals of key figures Scopes, Clarence Darrow, and William Jennings Bryan; his ferocious take on the fundamentalist culture surrounding it allincluding a raucous midnight trip into the woods to witness a secret holy roller service.
Shockingly, these reports have never been gathered together into a book of their ownuntil now.
A Religious Orgy In Tennessee includes all of Menckens reports for The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, and The American Mercury. It even includes his coverage of Bryans death just days after the trialan obituary so withering Mencken was forced by his editors to rewrite it, angering him and leading him to rewrite it yet again in a third version even less forgiving than the first. All three versions are included, as is a complete transcript of the trials most legendary exchange: Darrows blistering cross-examination of Bryan.
With the rise of intelligent design, H.L. Mencken s work has never seemed more unnervingly timelyor timeless.
("I am quite convinced that all religions, at bottom, are ...)
"I am quite convinced that all religions, at bottom, are pretty much alike. On the surface they may seem to differ greatly, but what appears on the surface is not always religion. Go beneath it, and one finds invariably the same sense of helplessness before the cosmic mysteries, and the same pathetic attempt to resolve it by appealing to higher powers."--from Treatise on the Gods
H. L. Mencken is perhaps best known for his scathing political satire. But politicians, as far as Mencken was concerned, had no monopoly on self-righteous chest-thumping, deceit, and thievery. He also found religion to be an adversary worthy of his attention and, in Treatise on the Gods, he offers some of his best shots, a choreographed cannonade.
Mencken examines religion everywhere, from India to Peru, from the myths of Egypt to the traditional beliefs of America's Bible Belt. He compares Incas and Greeks, examines doctrines, dogmas, sacred texts, heresies, and ceremonies. He ranges far and wide, but returns at last to the subject that most provokes him: Christianity. He reviews the history of the Church and its founders. "It is Tertullian who is credited with the motto, Credo, quia absurdum est: I believe because it is incredible. Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer." Mencken is no less interested in the dissidents: "The Reformers were men of courage, but not many of them were intelligent." Against the old-time religion of fellow countrymen, Mencken posed as a figure of old-time skepticism, and he reaped the whirlwind. Controversial even before it was published in 1930, Treatise on the Gods remains what its author wished it to be: the plain, clear challenge of honest doubt.
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
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A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of res...)
A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance.
The prophetic and controversial classic.
In Defense of Women might well be considered a libertarian compliment to George Bernard Shaw's Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. As with Shaw's book this volume is an admixture of feminism tinged with masculine concern for the survival of marriage and love in a twentieth century already witness to rapid change and the social breakdown of conventions that accompany such changes. Hardly a paeon of praise to women, it is more an interpretation that the natural advantages of being a female can translate into psychological traits that are hardly admirable.
American author, critic, and journalist, H. L. Mencken maintained that "the average woman, whatever her deficiencies, is greatly superior to the average man. The very ease with which she defies and swindles him in several capital situations of life is the clearest of proofs of her general superiority." Ever the iconoclast, Mencken viewed gender relations as a battlefield. His deference to female supremacy is that of a soldier awed by an opponent's overwhelming skill and cunning: "There was no weakness of man that she did not penetrate and take advantage of. There was no trick that she did not put to effective use. There was no device so bold and inordinate that it daunted her." In Defense of Women was written during World War I and first appeared in print in 1922, only a few years after American women had achieved the right to vote. Nearly a century later its topics, ranging from monogamy, polygamy, and prostitution to the double standard, employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and declining birth and marriage rates, remain of vital interest to modern readers. Written in Mencken's characteristic no-nonsense manner, this volume crackles with controversy and caustic wit.
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With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "lan...)
With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Menckenâs death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.
Most of these autobiographical writings first appeared in the New Yorker. Here Mencken recalls memories of a safe and happy boyhood in the Baltimore of the 1880s.
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, editor, critic, and philologist who powerfully influenced U. S. fiction through the 1920s. Though he was not a distinguished stylist, the extraordinary vigor of his expression was memorable.
Background
Henry Louis Mencken was born on September 12, 1880 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the oldest of four children born to parents of proud German descent, August Mencken and Anna Abhau Mencken. His father and uncle were joint owners of a thriving cigar factory, and the family enjoyed material comfort and security throughout his childhood. When Mencken was three, the family moved into a three-story brick house near Baltimore's central business district.
Education
Henry completed his primary education at Professor Knapp's School. His father bet him that he could not graduate at the top of his class, but he did, finishing his senior year as class valedictorian. At age 16 Mencken graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and enrolled for a correspondence course in writing of the Cosmopolitan University in 1898.
Career
After graduating from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Menchen became a reporter on the Baltimore Herald. He rose rapidly; soon he was the Herald's city editor and then editor. In 1906 he joined the organization known as the Sunpapers, which he served in a variety of ways until his retirement. His outstanding piece of journalism, widely syndicated, concerned the Scopes trial of 1925 in Tennessee, in which a high school science instructor was prosecuted for teaching evolution, contrary to a state law. The Smart Set and the American Mercury, both of which Mencken shared in editing (1908-1923; 1924-1933) with George Jean Nathan, were additional vehicles for his opinions.
Mencken's journalistic skills became his chief handicap as a critic, for he sacrificed discrimination for immediate attention, esthetic and philosophical distinctions for the reductions of easy reading, and subtleties of statement for buffoonery and bombast. Yet, though one may deplore his methods, they gained a wide audience and opened the way for the development of criticism.
Mencken derived certain critical principles from his study of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and French critic Rémy de Gourmont. Nietzsche's contempt for the leveling tendencies of democracy and Christianity influenced Mencken's heavily ironic Notes on Democracy (1926), A Treatise on the Gods(1930), and A Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934). His thorough knowledge of Nietzsche was established in his pioneering American study The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908). He also established himself as a misogynist with In Defense of Women (1918).
From Rémy de Gourmont's declaration that to "erect into laws one's personal impressions" is the purpose of the "sincere" critic, Mencken derived the impetus that resulted in the six series of Prejudices(1919-1927), which, together with A Book of Prefaces (1917), constitute his strongest claim as a critic. His crusades for Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, and Sinclair Lewis helped establish those novelists; he was ambivalent toward William Dean Howells and George Bernard Shaw; and he greatly overestimated a class of poor writers. Lumping together certain mild practitioners of his own craft whom he suspected of timidity and prudishness – the "Mores, Brownells, Phelpses, Mabies, Brander Matthewses, and other such grave and glittering fish" – helped to clear the field for fresher talents. Unfortunately, even when Mencken was vehemently right, his reader had the uneasy suspicion that this was fortuitous.
Mencken's appreciation of the juicy phrase interested him in its informal aspects. Behind this interest was a distrust of Englishmen – a philo-Teutonism – that deluded him into holding that American speech was the unique product of a new environment. Genuine industry and the liveliest curiosity produced in 1919 The American Language and in the following years its supplements (1945, 1948) and revisions (1921, 1923, 1936). In a field where one finds such great names as those of Ben Jonson, the brothers Grimm, and Otto Jespersen, Mencken meets his peers. But none, not even that of Dr. Jonson, stands for livelier discourse and happier illustrations of its points than Mencken's. By the time of his death on January 29, 1956, in his beloved Baltimore, recognition of his service to the language was everywhere admitted.
H. L. Mencken's other works include Ventures into Verse (1903), Bernard Shaw: The Plays (1905), The Artist (1912), A Book of Burlesques (1916), A Little Book in C Major (1916), Damn: A Book of Calumny (1918), Heliogablus (1920), Making a President (1932), New Dictionary of Quotations (1942), Christmas Story (1946), and Mencken Chrestomathy (1949). He gathered the more outrageous attacks upon him in Menckeniana: A Schimplexion (1927).
Unlike Nietzsche (who was at heart an idealist and a visionary, and who, if he despised contemporary morality and mankind, nevertheless hoped to induce a master morality and to breed a race of supermen), Mencken scoffed at this "messianic delusion, " adopting only the negative aspects of Nietzscheanism for his castigation of things American and "bourgeois. "
Connections
In 1930 Mencken married Sara Haardt, a professor of English at Goucher College. Their union was short, however, for his wife died in 1935.