H. L. Mencken
1880–1956 10 entries
Biography
H. L. Mencken was an American journalist, essayist and critic, one of the sharpest satirists of American life in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Baltimore in 1880 into a family of German descent, he worked in his father’s cigar factory after school and at eighteen became a reporter, the start of a lifelong career with the Baltimore newspapers, above all The Sun. As literary critic and then co-editor of the magazine The Smart Set, and from 1924 as founder and editor of The American Mercury, he championed writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. Known as the Sage of Baltimore, he mocked puritanism, Prohibition and the narrow-minded middle class he called the booboisie.
In 1925 his reports from the Scopes trial in Tennessee, where a teacher was tried for teaching evolution, became the most famous of his career. His essays filled the six volumes of Prejudices, and The American Language, first published in 1919, remains a landmark study of English as it is spoken in the United States. His short, cynical definitions and epigrams, gathered in books such as A Little Book in C Major and A Book of Burlesques, are still widely quoted. A stroke in 1948 left him unable to read or write, and he died in Baltimore in 1956.
- Aphorisms 10