Journalism - Collections & History, American & Canadian Letters, Journalists - News & Media Biography

Do You Remember?

Name: Do You Remember?
Author: Jack Sanders
ISBN: 9780938420545

by Jack Sanders

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Overview

In 1918, while Henry Louis Mencken was editing The Smart Set in New York and working on The American Language in his native Baltimore, his best friend, Philip Goodman, a New York advertising man, bon vivant, and fledgling publisher, wrote a letter "reminiscing" about their old German-American neighborhood in the 1880s and 1890s. He invented characters and events and wrote with irony and affection for those better times. Mencken rose instantly to the challenge and wrote a letter in similar vein. For three years the correspondents tried to out-do each other in telling tall stories. Sanders has reconstructed and annotated this correspondence.

The Maryland Historical Society

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Editorials

Library Journal

Mencken often poked fun at conformist America for its tight-laced ideas and attitudes. In this volume of correspondence between him and Philip Goodman, the New York entrepreneur and man-about-town, the two men engage in a similar kind of humor (but rather more nostalgic in tone) for the special world of immigrant America during the 1880s and 1890s of their childhood. Edited by Sanders, a member of the Mencken Society, the letters (1918-20) are in part about business, but of greater interest are the made-up stories of German immigrants from Baltimore. Although both men are totally credible in their telling of these tales, nearly all of them are fictitious. Shining through is the love both feel for a more innocent time, a more artless way of being. The use of German "speaking names" (so chosen to describe the character of the person), the parade of human failings warmly embraced or soundly decried, and the several levels of humor all combine for an exceptional reading experience.Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.