H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken was an influential American journalist, essayist, and critic known for his acerbic wit and scathing commentary on American politics and culture. He was a prominent figure in the "Lost Generation" and a fierce advocate for freedom of speech and individual liberty. Mencken's writing often challenged conventional thinking and exposed the hypocrisies of society, making him a controversial but respected figure in American intellectual circles.
3 Key excerpts on "H. L. Mencken"
eBook - ePubCurriculum, Accreditation and Coming of Age of Higher Education
Perspectives on the History of Higher Education
- Roger L. Geiger, Roger L. Geiger(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...He cherished the idea of Harvard and the reality of the medical school at Johns Hopkins, but he thoroughly enjoyed exposing their imperfections. 7 Mencken’s influence as a social critic began 100 years ago and lasted through most of the first half of the twentieth century. In Books That Changed America, Robert B. Downs labeled Mencken, “a satirist, humorist, devastating critic, and word juggler supreme.” He noted that readership swelled “as he damned ignorance and dishonesty in American politics, hypocrisy in the church, sham in the educational system, puritanism in every form, provincialism, arty art, do-goodism among social reformers, racial discrimination, and superpatriotism, while defending with equal vigor the right of the individual to live his life without interference from bureaucrats, prohibitionists, censors, bluenoses and their like.” 8 Attesting to the continuing longevity of his style and his ideas is the steady stream of published volumes since his death in 1956—including anthologies, memoirs, volumes of letters, a diary, and seven biographies (two in the past five years). 9 While excellent edited works by Mencken and others have collected his written words on politics, journalism, religion, music, language, democracy, literature, and women, no published work has gathered his insightful, critical, and often humorous reflections on higher education. 10 This is surprising in light of his extensive and perceptive writing on the subject, and it prompts several questions: What issues and ideas surfaced most prominently in Mencken’s writing related to higher education? What did Mencken write about those issues and ideas; and how did his writing reflect contexts of time, place, and person? How can we understand and reconcile the contradictions inherent in Mencken’s writing on higher education as he variously attacked and applauded individuals, institutions, and ideas? The opportunity to address these questions provides only one reason to revisit Mencken’s thoughts on higher education...
eBook - ePubWriters to Read
Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf
- Douglas Wilson(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Crossway(Publisher)
...This was a transition time for him. He had been the darling of the outsiders, attacking the old order. But when those outsiders became the new insiders, propping up the fraud that was FDR, Mencken continued to treat the pronouncements of the (new) establishment as just so much more buncombe, to use one of his words. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. His popularity as a writer therefore waned somewhat later in his life, but he was always read, and while his influence had declined, it was still an influence that had not died out entirely. After a stroke in 1948 he was incapacitated as a writer and ended his last few years as a homebody. DIGGING DEEPER C. S. Lewis says somewhere, and I think it is somewhere in the recesses of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, that the color and zest of Elizabethan English is dead and deep. He then says that this gift, long departed from the British Isles, has been inherited by “our American cousins.” I think this observation is quite right; in its assorted heyday, American English is full-tilt Elizabethan and all without an Elizabeth for the inspiration. And when I think of this truth, the person who comes to mind immediately is H. L. Mencken. Few writers have as distinctive a voice as Mencken. Mencken understood that once a natural voice is found, the timbre of that voice should be cultivated, not suppressed. Good writing can “never be impersonal.” 8 If you read a detailed account of his life, you will see that Mencken was capable of being a cad. But he was a kindly cad, all things considered. One friend of his said, “I have never known a public figure who was so different from his reputation.” 9 G. K. Chesterton once offered this about Mencken: I have so warm an admiration for Mr...
eBook - ePubAmerican Literature in Context
1900-1930
- Ann Massa(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These recordings usually died with the events. 2 But his piece on the veteran American politician William Jennings Bryan, published the day after Bryan’s death, has rightly survived as an important piece of writing for political and cultural historians and for literary critics. Not only does it represent, at their most effective, Mencken’s acidulous style and the eclectic American language he used so dextrously; it pictures the hardening polarization of ideals and values in American life in the third decade of the century, a polarization summed up by the proceedings at Dayton, Tennessee, and by Mencken’s reaction to them. Free speech was set against censorship, the intellect against the emotions, the agnostic against the fundamental Christian, science against religion, North against South, East against West. Almost all of the great Mencken’s classic targets, as he categorized them in A Mencken Chrestomathy, were in range at Dayton: ‘Homo Sapiens, types of men, religion, morals, death, Crime and punishment, Government, Democracy, Americans, the South, History, Statesmen, American Immortals, Odd Fish, Economics, Pedagogy, Psychology, Science, Quackery.’ 3 ‘In Memoriam: W.J.B.’ also offers an unsurpassed example of that American journalism which, in its mixture of the formal and the colloquial, is an art form in itself. None was more appropriate to a time when communications – car, plane, radio, silent movie, increasingly used telephones and increasingly available national newspapers – were reshaping America. The occasion for Mencken’s essay was the ‘Monkey’ trial of Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes on the charge of teaching the theory of evolution in the high school system in Dayton, Tennessee...
