H.L. Mencken
If we’re talking pure skill as a writer, I am taking “The Sage of Baltimore,” Henry Louis Mencken on my team.
Things haven’t changed that much—if at all—with the American public since the days of Mencken.
I don’t agree with everything Mencken wrote, but I agree with how he wrote it.
He lived in a different world. The son of a cigar-maker, born in 1880, Mencken was nearly 100 years before my time. His Baltimore was, “placid, secure, uneventful and happy.”
If you’ve watched The Wire or We Own This City from HBO, you’d be right there with me in vouching that the last one-and-a-half centuries have not been kind to Mencken’s telling of Baltimore’s reputation.
Mencken was a newspaperman from a very young age. Never went to college, but was more educated in “real life” than the good majority of “college boys.”
In 1924, he co-founded The American Mercury, which was soon a national phenomenon. Mencken called it, “a serious review, the gaudiest and damnedest ever seen in the Republic.”
He resigned as editor in 1933 due to philosophical differences with the publisher.
I am no Mencken. The guy was a force of nature. Even after he had a stroke, the guy still created content at an inhuman pace. The output was extraordinary.
I’m just a guy who likes to go fishing and watch baseball games. My life ain’t that complicated.
I have no philosophical differences with my publisher…for I am he.
But I have only seen one or two “serious reviews” in my time. The corporate press is pretty much a joke these days.
For the last twenty or so years, I have wondered what it would have been like to have a “review” like Mencken could have done it…in the 21st century.
I stopped wondering, took my own advice—“ready, fire, aim”—and started one.
It’s this family of websites I built … starting with briandoleary.com
I publish it myself.
Tell your friends about it.
This is a serious website, the gaudiest and damnedest ever seen in the 21st century of the Republic.
Lots of “Baltimore flavor” in it, too…
Mencken expressed anti-egalitarian views that are now unfashionable, and he never missed a chance to cast ridicule on the democratic welfare state. There are more than a few of Mencken’s unseasonable remarks that would cause blood to surge to the head of David Brooks, the New York Times’s “resident conservative,” who has just written about “national greatness” and the role to be assigned to the federal welfare state in making us all “great”: the most famous are “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard” and “every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” And how about this one for the fans of public administration: “I believe all government is evil and that trying to improve it is a waste of time.” And this for the devotees of judicial activism: “A judge is a law student who grades his own examination papers.”
Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken (1880-1956) was a journalist, cultural critic, and—though he did not consider himself a scholar per se—”pointed out the quarry for scholars to bag.”
Mencken’s study of The American Language is a comprehensive study, over 500 pages and 12,000 entries.
Not a gentleman? Not a scholar?
Impressive fellow nonetheless.
Known as the “Sage of Baltimore,” Mencken worked for The Baltimore Sun and associated “Sunpapers” for most of his career.
Mencken’s father was a cigar manufacturer and salesman. Though Mencken would rarely be seen without cigar in hand, he left the family business as a teenager—soon after his father’s death—in order to focus on a career in journalism.
His journalism took off, and he was the preeminent “man of letters” in the American culture for the first half of the 20th century.
“Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate…Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.”
— H.L. Mencken
Books — by and about — "The Sage of Baltimore"
The American Language, Second Edition
by H.L. Mencken
First published in 1919, THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE, is a scholarly treatise on the American dialect.
Over a century ago, Mencken considered The American Language apart from “English.”
Edmund Wilson said of Mencken’s magnum opus,
“American writers were finally able to take flight from the old tree and to trust for the first time their own dialect …
Mencken showed the positive value of our own Vulgate heritage.”
by H.L. Mencken
The unabridged audiobook, narrated by Grover Gardner.
The “chrestomathy” is a selection of choice Mencken writing, some of which were never published.
Amongst others, Mencken skewers some of my favorite targets—the Roosevelt presidents (“Teddy” & “FDR”) and Woodrow Wilson.
The writing is phenomenal. Listening to it is marvelous.
If you need the physical book, CLICK HERE.
The anthology that spans an entire lifetime of writing by America’s greatest curmudgeon, with a “flick of mischief on nearly every page.”
The first biography of Mencken that I was fortunate to read. Teachout is a great writer, but not at all politically or culturally congruent with Mencken.
Teachout treats Mencken fairly, so much so that I bought the book twice—I have the hardback and the paperback.
I can’t remember what I bought first, but the paperback has gone on many trips with me.
The rabbit hole is deep with Mencken. Reading more Mencken is good for you. Whether you agree with him or not—and there is a good chance that you won’t—the style and clarity with which The Sage of Baltimore communicates is worth enjoying and studying.
