3/14/22

This is undoubtedly the place to start when seeking the many enjoyments available from Mencken's disdainful, vitriolic prose. Few authors ever attain Mencken's knack for just the right moment to introduce the perfect bit of obloquy into his portrait of various representatives of what he referred to as Boobus americanus. These essays, though they are more often literary or intellectual than political, do contain numerous topical allusions, some of which resound across the decades, but many will be headscratchers even to those who have familiarized themselves pretty well with the period. Also, Mencken's literary criticism has not aged particularly well, and he could be very wrong, and thus particularly irritating in his eloquence, on many topics. In short, a writer who was much more effective, and persuasive, when arguing against rather than for. ( )

An essayist of Orwellian gifts, H.L. Mencken illuminates the American scene prior to 1945. Always entertaining, and full of the epigrammatic genius, his prose flows easily on. His goal was to make a buck, and to educate the American in the face of the larger media exposure backed by business interests. He's the ancestor of Mailer's reportage, and that of Hunter S. Thompson. Anthologies of his essays are not to be missed by the discriminating reader. (and the lover of the sucker punch!)
There were six volumes of "Prejudices" by the end of his life, so keep an eye out. ( )

On loan John Grenke