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Overview
Long famous as a political, social, and cultural gadfly, journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken was unafraid to speak his mind on controversial topics and to express his views in a deliberately provocative manner. Mencken was prolific; much of his best work lies buried in the newspapers and magazines in which it originally appeared. Mencken's America is a sampling of this uncollected work, arranged to present the wide-ranging treatise on American culture that Mencken himself never wrote. The core of the book is a series of six articles on "The American" published in the Smart Set in 1913 and 1914. Never before reprinted, they embody the essence of Mencken's views on the deficiencies of his countrymen. Bracing, infuriating, and pungent, H. L. Mencken's writings retain their relevance even after the passage of nearly a hundred years, cogently discussing issues with which Americans of the twenty-first century are still wrestling. Sagaciously edited by S. T. Joshi, one of the country's foremost Mencken scholars, Mencken's America is a superb example of America's turning the looking glass on itself.Synopsis
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) was an acerbic political, social, and cultural critic whose work appeared in magazines and newspapers across the US. Here are 25 essays published from 1913 into the 1930s on living in the US; the American landscape,; politics, morality and religion; and art, literature, and culture. Joshi, a Seattle-based writer who has edited several books of Mencken's writings, provides notes, a glossary of names, and an index. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Publishers Weekly
H.L. Mencken was a man who firmly believed that "[m]en are surely not at their worst when they say what they actually think, even if it is shocking to their neighbors," and 80 years after some of these essays originally appeared in newspapers and magazines, his writings are still hard to resist. Mencken's wit and breadth of knowledge are apparent throughout this collection, but he is at his best and most timely when his targets are politics, the American character and the "militant Puritanism" that, according to him, shapes them both. His skewering of democracy as a system "this fundamental assumption that a group of idiots, if only its numbers be large enough, is wiser and more virtuous than any conceivable individual who is not an idiot" is well reasoned enough to provoke a weeklong debate about such favorite (and still hotly controversial) Mencken topics as big government, mob rule and the legislation of morality. A few of the essays included here do not hold up well, such as "The American: His Language"; others, like Mencken's essays about Baltimore and San Francisco, now read like charming period pieces rather than insightful social commentary. Still, the variety in this collection (including a prescient piece on the emergence of the independent film industry) highlights just how many things about America and Americans made H.L. Mencken laugh, wax indignant or at least pick up his pen. (Feb.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.