Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880, Baltimore – January 29, 1956, Baltimore, Maryland), was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century.
Mencken is perhaps best remembered today for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States and his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he named the "Monkey" trial.
In his capacity as editor and "man of ideas," Mencken became close friends with the leading literary figures of his time, including Theodore Dreiser who introduced him to Charles Fort and the Fortean Society, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ben Hecht, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Alfred Knopf, as well as a mentor to several young reporters, including Alistair Cooke. He also mentored John Fante. Ayn Rand addressed Mencken as "the greatest representative of a philosophy" to which she wanted to dedicate her life in a July 1934 letter, and listed him as her favorite columnist in later years.
Mencken frankly admired Friedrich Nietzsche -- he was the first writer in English to provide a scholarly analysis of Nietzsche's writings and philosophy -- and Joseph Conrad. His humor and satire owe much to Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. He did much to defend Theodore Dreiser, despite freely admitting his faults, including stating forthrightly that Dreiser often wrote badly and was a gullible man. Mencken also expressed his appreciation for William Graham Sumner in a 1941 collection of Sumner's essays, and regretted never having known Sumner personally.
For Mencken, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the finest work of American literature. Much of that book relates how gullible and ignorant country "boobs" (as Mencken referred to them) are swindled by confidence men like the (deliberately) pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin" roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle by posing as enlightened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk), as pious "saved" men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and as learned doctors of phrenology (who can barely spell). Mencken read the novel as a story of America's hilarious dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "... the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."
Mencken was at the top of his game in the 1920s, when a backlash against WWI-era superpatriotism and government expansion (exemplified in the Palmer Raids) led many of the American literati to move to Europe, or to protest; Mencken was arguably the most pugnacious of the latter. The "anti-American" label is an epithet today (and to a lesser degree in Mencken's time); the term is not used here to defame Mencken.
Mencken is fictionalized in Inherit the Wind as the cynical sarcastic atheist E. K. Hornbeck (right), seen here in the film played by Gene Kelly. To his left is Henry Drummond, based on Clarence Darrow and portrayed by Spencer Tracy.
He would have delighted in being called "anti-American"; his contrarian spirit and admiration of continental European culture (Germany especially) led him to mount unapologetically scathing attacks on nearly all aspects of American culture.[attribution needed]
As a nationally syndicated columnist and book author, he notably attacked ignorance, intolerance, "frauds", fundamentalist Christianity and the "Booboisie," his word for the ignorant middle classes. In 1926, he deliberately had himself arrested for selling an issue of The American Mercury that was banned in Boston under the Comstock laws. Mencken heaped scorn not only on the public officials he disliked, but also on the contemporary state of American democracy itself: in 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia".
The Great Depression and the New Deal, which Mencken did not support, were factors in Mencken's dropping out of fashion, as were his lack of support for the United States' participation in WWII, and his personal detestation of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There was little demand for his services as a book reviewer, satirist, and political commentator, so between Haardt's death and the 1948 stroke which left him aware and fully conscious but unable to read or write, Mencken's main intellectual activity, other than writing occasional pieces for the Baltimore papers, was his research on the American language and writing his memoirs. These took the form of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays, first published in the New Yorker, then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
After his stroke, Mencken enjoyed listening to classical music and talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense as if already dead. Preoccupied as he was with how he would be perceived after his death, he organized his papers, letters, newspaper clippings and columns, even grade school report cards, despite being unable to read. These materials were made available to scholars in stages, in 1971, 1981, and 1991, and include hundreds of thousands of letters sent and received - the only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.
Mencken is interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery. His epitaph reads:
"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl."
Try the BEST MySpace Editor and MySpace Backgrounds at MySpace Toolbox !