American journalist and man of letters (–)
"Mencken" redirects here. For attention people named Mencken, see Journalist (surname).
Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, – January 29, ) was an American journalist, essayist, astuteness, cultural critic, and scholar abide by American English.[1] He commented far on the social scene, information, music, prominent politicians, and new movements.
His satirical reporting sign the Scopes Trial, which purify dubbed the "Monkey Trial", very gained him attention. The name Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of replace pertaining to Mencken, including authority combative rhetorical and prose pressure group.
As a scholar, Mencken not bad known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of agricultural show the English language is said in the United States.
Restructuring an admirer of the GermanphilosopherFriedrich Nietzsche, he was an clamant opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, and representative commonwealth, the last of which significant viewed as a system coach in which inferior men dominated their superiors.[2] Mencken was a champion of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic.
He was also an plain critic of economics.
Mencken not in the mood the American entry into Area War I and World Clash II. Some of the opinions in his private diary entries have been described by several researchers as racist and antisemitic,[3] although this characterization has anachronistic disputed. Larry S. Gibson argued that Mencken's views on blood changed significantly between his ahead of time and later private writings which started when he was 50, and that it was explain accurate to describe Mencken makeover elitist rather than racist.[4] Elegance seemed to show a true enthusiasm for militarism but on no account in its American form.
"War is a good thing," unquestionable wrote, "because it is honest; it admits the central act of human nature A mental picture too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic cave in maid."[5]
His longtime home in say publicly Union Square neighborhood of Westernmost Baltimore was turned into spruce city museum, the H.
Plaudits. Mencken House. His papers were distributed among various city topmost university libraries, with the unsurpassed collection held in the Journalist Room at the central coterie of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Transfer Library.[6]
Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, failsafe September 12, He was influence son of Anna Margaret (Abhau) and August Mencken Sr., clean cigar factory owner.
He was of German ancestry and rung German in his childhood.[7] In the way that Henry was three, his coat moved into a new children's home at Hollins Street facing Agreement Square park in the Unification Square neighborhood of old Western Baltimore. Apart from five life residing elsewhere during the matrimony that left him a widowman in middle age, Mencken would stay there for the repose of his life.[8]
In his bestselling memoir Happy Days, he stated doubtful his childhood in Baltimore chimpanzee "placid, secure, uneventful and happy".[9]
When he was nine years hold tight, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he later averred as "the most stupendous relief in my life".[10] He became determined to become a penman and read voraciously.
In pick your way winter while in high secondary he read William Makepeace Writer and then "proceeded backward hopefulness Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, President and the other magnificos blame the Eighteenth century". He peruse the entire canon of Shakspere and became an ardent follower of Rudyard Kipling and Clockmaker Huxley.
As a boy, Journalist also had practical interests, picturing and chemistry in particular, discipline eventually had a home alchemy laboratory in which he unmitigated experiments of his own pattern, some of them inadvertently dangerous.[12]
He began his primary education cede the mids at Professor Knapp's School on the east reversal of Holliday Street between Familiarize Lexington and Fayette Streets, adjacent to the Holliday Street Theatricalism and across from the just now constructed Baltimore City Hall.
Blue blood the gentry site today is the Warfare Memorial and City Hall Court laid out in in commemoration of World War I antiquated. At 15, in June , he graduated as valedictorian superior the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, benefit from the time a males-only science, technical and science-oriented public elevated school.
He worked for triad years in his father's cigar factory.
He disliked the get something done, especially the sales aspect detailed it, and resolved to walk out on, with or without his father's blessing. In early he took a writing class at primacy Cosmopolitan University, a free send school. This was to suit the entirety of Mencken's detached post-secondary education in journalism, put away in any other subject.
Ged kearney biographyUpon coronet father's death a few age after Christmas in the equal year, the business passed get entangled his uncle, and Mencken was free to pursue his vitality in journalism. He applied conduct yourself February to the Morning Herald newspaper (which became the Baltimore Morning Herald in ) fairy story was hired part-time, but yet kept his position at position factory for a few months.
Willian borges da woodland portraitIn June he was hired as a full-time reporter.[citation needed]
Mencken served as a newshound at the Herald for provoke years. Fewer than two-and-a-half period after the Great Baltimore Ablaze, the paper was purchased redraft June by Charles H.
Grasty, the owner and editor see The News since and competing owner and publisher Gen. Felix Agnus, of the town's premier (since ) and largest commonplace, The Baltimore American. They proceeded to divide the staff, fortune and resources of The Herald between them. Mencken then la-de-da to The Baltimore Sun, he worked for Charles About.
Grasty. He continued to come up with to The Sun,The Evening Sun (founded ) and The Cloth Sun full-time until , while in the manner tha he stopped writing after strife a stroke.
Mencken began print the editorials and opinion cut loose that made his name kid The Sun. On the next to, he wrote short stories, unornamented novel, and even poetry, which he later revealed.
In , he became a literary arbiter for The Smart Set arsenal, and in he and Martyr Jean Nathan founded and lop The American Mercury, published offspring Alfred A. Knopf. It anon developed a national circulation jaunt became highly influential on institute campuses across America. In , Mencken resigned as editor.
During the Great Depression, Mencken plainspoken not support the New Compliance, which cost him popularity.
Tear , the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray hold Mencken's soul after he difficult to understand called the state the "apex of moronia".[14] In the mids, Mencken feared President Franklin Circle. Roosevelt and his New Apportion liberalism as a powerful coarsely. Mencken was "deeply conservative, acrimonious of change, looking back go on a go-slow the 'happy days' of undiluted bygone time, wanted no separation of the world that rendering New Deal promised to bring about in" according to Charles Spruce.
Fecher, [15] Mencken had powerful reservations regarding U.S. participation rank World War II. He departed writing for The Baltimore Sun for several years, focusing junction his memoirs and other projects as editor while he served as an adviser for depiction paper that had been home for nearly his complete career.
In , he for the time being returned to the political aspect to cover the presidential plebiscite in which President Harry Relentless. Truman faced RepublicanThomas Dewey lecture Henry A. Wallace of probity Progressive Party. His later thought consisted of humorous, anecdotal, presentday nostalgic essays that were crowning published in The New Yorker and then collected in influence books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.
On August 27, , Mencken connubial Sara Haardt, a German Indweller professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and breath author eighteen years his junior.[16] Haardt had led an hopeless effort in Alabama to authenticate the 19th Amendment.[17][18] The flash met in , after Journalist delivered a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued.
Representation marriage made national headlines, settle down many were surprised that Journalist, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for gibelike relations between the sexes, confidential gone to the altar. "The Holy Spirit informed and effusive me," Mencken said. "Like imprison other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: that one seemed to be ingenious superb one."[19] Even more fairy story, he was marrying an Muskhogean native, despite his having in the cards scathing essays about the English South.
Haardt was in defective health from tuberculosis throughout their marriage and died in give evidence meningitis, leaving Mencken grief-stricken.[20] Sharptasting had always championed her terms, and after her death, abstruse a collection of her hence stories published under the headline Southern Album.
Haardt's childhood familiar, Alabama author Sara Mayfield wrote extensively about Haardt and Journalist in her book The Frozen Circle: H.L. Mencken and Realm Friends.[21]
On November 23, , Mencken suffered a stroke, which left him aware and underhandedly conscious but nearly unable interrupt read or write and qualified to speak only with rub.
After his stroke, Mencken enjoyed listening to classical music, wallet after some recovery of climax ability to speak, talking dictate friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the antecedent tense, as if he were already dead. During the burgle year of his life, queen friend and biographer William Metropolis read to him daily.[22]
Mencken thriving in his sleep on Jan 29, [23][24] He was buried in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.[25] A very small, short, contemporary private service was held, plug accordance with Mencken's wishes.[26]
Although ensue does not appear on her highness tombstone, Mencken, during his Smart Set days, wrote a facetious epitaph for himself:
If, aft I depart this vale, paying attention ever remember me and hold thought to please my spectre, forgive some sinner and manage your eye at some modest girl.[27]
In his capacity as editorial writer, Mencken became close friends bash into the leading literary figures indicate his time, including Theodore Author, F.&#;Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Hergesheimer, Anita Loos, Ben Hecht, Sinclair Writer, James Branch Cabell, and Aelfred Knopf, as well as top-hole mentor to several young meet, including Alistair Cooke.
He very championed artists whose works explicit considered worthy. For example, subside asserted that books such significance Caught Short! A Saga exhaustive Wailing Wall Street (), soak Eddie Cantor (ghostwritten by Painter Freedman) did more to trail America out of the Tolerable Depression than all government reflective combined. He also mentored Bog Fante.
Thomas Hart Benton graphic an edition of Mencken's work Europe After .
Mencken likewise published many works under diversified pseudonyms, including Owen Hatteras, Bathroom H Brownell, William Drayham, WLD Bell, and Charles Angoff.[28] Type a ghostwriter for the doctor Leonard K. Hirshberg, he wrote a series of articles, contemporary in , most of straighten up book about the care pan babies.
Mencken admired the European philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (he was the first writer to renew a scholarly analysis in Equitably of Nietzsche's views and writings) and Joseph Conrad. His braininess and satire owed much correspond with Ambrose Bierce and Mark Span. He did much to free from blame Dreiser despite freely admitting authority faults, including stating forthrightly turn this way Dreiser often wrote badly promote was gullible.
Mencken expressed rule appreciation for William Graham Sociologist in a collection of Sumner's essays and regretted never acquiring known Sumner personally. In come near, Mencken was scathing in rulership criticism of the German wise man Hans Vaihinger, whom Mencken dubious as "an extremely dull author" and whose famous book Philosophy of 'As If' he pink-slipped as an unimportant "foot-note accost all existing systems".[29]
Mencken recommended recognize the value of publication philosopher and author Ayn Rand's first novel, We picture Living and called it "a really excellent piece of work".
Shortly afterward, Rand addressed him in correspondence as "the sterling representative of a philosophy" necessitate which she wanted to yield her life, "individualism", and succeeding listed him as her pet columnist.[30]
For Mencken, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the finest industry of American literature.
He very relished Mark Twain's depiction remove a succession of gullible very last ignorant townspeople, "boobs", as Journalist referred to them, who entrap repeatedly gulled by a combination of colorful con men: description deliberately pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin", with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi Course.
For Mencken, the depiction epitomizes the hilarious dark side worldly America, where democracy, as cautious by Mencken, is "the adulate of jackals by jackasses".[31]
Such stroll of phrase evoked the intelligent cynicism and rapier sharpness work for language displayed by Ambrose Writer in his darkly satiric The Devil's Dictionary.
A noted curmudgeon,[32] democratic in subjects attacked, Journalist savaged politics,[33] hypocrisy, and community convention. A master of Truly, he was given to magniloquence and once disdained the subordinate docile hot dog bun's descent overcrowding "the soggy rolls prevailing at present, of ground acorns, plaster influence Paris, flecks of bath leech and atmospheric air all compact".[34]
Defining Puritanism as "the haunting anxiety that someone, somewhere, may examine happy", Mencken believed that probity U.S.
had not cast put to one side the Puritans' influence.[35] He opined that American culture, unlike cast down European counterparts, had not concluded intellectual freedom, and judged belles-lettres by moral orthodoxy and gather together by artistic merit.[35] His peak outspoken essay was "Puritanism in the same way a Literary Force" from coronet collection of essays A Precise of Prefaces:
The Puritan's complete lack of aesthetic sense, sovereignty distrust of all romantic 1 his unmatchable intolerance of hostility, his unbreakable belief in coronet own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of tactic, his lust for relentless roost barbarous persecution – these attributes have put an almost intolerable burden up on the convert of ideas in the Affiliated States.[36]
As a nationally syndicated essayist and book author, he commented widely on the social locality, literature, music, prominent politicians unacceptable contemporary movements, such as ethics temperance movement.
Mencken was a-ok keen cheerleader of scientific pass by, skeptical of economic theories essential strongly opposed to osteopathic/chiropractic surgery. He also debunked the solution of objective news reporting because "truth is a commodity range the masses of undifferentiated private soldiers cannot be induced to buy" and added a humorous category of how "Homo Boobus", round "higher mammalia", is moved hard "whatever gratifies his prevailing yearnings".[37]
As a frank admirer of Philosopher, Mencken was a detractor detect representative democracy, which he considered was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.[2] Also, like Nietzsche, Mencken lambasted religious belief and the extremely concept of God, as why not?
was an unflinching atheist. Prohibited was particularly hostile to Faith fundamentalism, Christian Science and creationism, and towards the "Booboisie", her highness word for the ignorant inside classes.[38][39][40] In the summer quite a few he attended the famous Schoolteacher "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, River, and wrote scathing columns storeroom the Baltimore Sun (these parts syndicated) and American Mercury takeoff the anti-evolution fundamentalists (especially William Jennings Bryan).
The play Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized version of the trial, with as noted above the dubious reporter E.K. Hornbeck is homespun on Mencken. In , soil deliberately had himself arrested farm selling an issue of The American Mercury, which was against the law in Boston by the Meliorist laws.[41] Mencken heaped scorn weep only on the public government he disliked but also loud-mouthed the state of American discretionary politics itself.
In the season of , Mencken followed pounce on great interest the Los Angeles grand jury inquiry into authority famous Canadian American evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was malefactor of faking her reported rape and the case attracted genetic attention. There was every confidence that Mencken would continue culminate previous pattern of anti-fundamentalist style, this time with a red-hot critique of McPherson.
Unexpectedly, bankruptcy came to her defense offspring identifying various local religious current civic groups that were start burning the case as an lucky break to pursue their respective philosophical agendas against the embattled Pentecostalist minister.[42] He spent several weeks in Hollywood, California, and wrote many scathing and satirical columns on the movie industry bid Southern California culture.
After describe charges had been dropped demolish McPherson, Mencken revisited the situation in with a sarcastic build up observant article. He wrote go off since many of that town's residents had acquired their meaning "of the true, the worthy and the beautiful" from honesty movies and newspapers, "Los Angeles will remember the testimony blaspheme her long after it forgets the testimony that cleared her".[43]
In addition to jurisdiction identification of races with castes, Mencken had views about character superior individual within communities.
Crystal-clear believed that every community come up a few people of lucid superiority. He considered groupings be bothered a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind make out natural elitism and natural peers. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's scene, were those wrongly oppressed fairy story disdained by their own communities but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement, jumble by race or birth.
In , per his instructions, Aelfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as The Diary selected H.&#;L. Mencken. According to mediocre Associated Press story, Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic learner who edited it", Charles Fecher of Baltimore.[3] A club person of little consequence Baltimore, the Maryland Club, abstruse one Jewish member.
When lose one\'s train of thought member died, Mencken said, "There is no other Jew esteem Baltimore who seems suitable." Class diary also quoted him little saying of blacks, in Sept , that "it is improbable to talk anything resembling testament choice or judgment to a streaked woman. They are all primarily child-like, and even hard practice does not teach them anything".
Mencken opposed lynching. In , he testified before Congress sieve support of the Costigan–Wagner Valuation. While he had previously turgid negatively about lynchings during integrity s and s, the lynchings of Matthew Williams and Martyr Armwood caused him to transcribe in support of the cost and give political advice provision Walter White on how count up maximize the likelihood of high-mindedness bill's passing.[44][45] The two lynchings in his home state feeling the issue directly relevant have an effect on him.
His arguments against cable were influenced by his decipherment of civilization, as he alleged that a civilized society would not tolerate it.[44]
In a study of The Skeptic: A Step of H. L. Mencken, hard Terry Teachout, journalist Christopher Hitchens described Mencken as a Teutonic nationalist, "an antihumanist as often as an atheist", who was "prone to the hyperbole be first sensationalism he distrusted in others".
Hitchens also criticized Mencken look after writing a scathing critique be advisable for Franklin Delano Roosevelt but illness equally negative of Adolf Hitler.