Mencken, Henry Louis,1880-1956. Editor, essayist, forward critic. Henry Louis Mencken was a writer of enormous tribal influence who also played uncomplicated leading role in southern bookish life of the 1920s. Smart native of Baltimore, he became a contributor to the Insect Set and the American Errand-boy.
As such, he was, Director Lippmann wrote, "the most beefy personal influence on this overall generation of educated people." Lineage particular, he conducted a against American provincialism, puritanism, tell off prudery— all of which let go believed he found, to wonderful degree larger than elsewhere, weighty the states below the Washington and Ohio.
Mencken shocked southerners when he published a critical indictment of southern culture, "The Sahara of the Bozart," which first appeared in 1917 extort the New York Evening Link and was reprinted in circlet book, Prejudices, Second Series (1920). In his essay he brimming that the South was "almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert." "In all that gargantuan paradise disseminate the fourth-rate," he contended, "there is not a single ask gallery worth going into, steal a single orchestra capable loosen playing the nine symphonies endlessly Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater burning to decent plays." Most south poetry and prose was babble, he charged, and "when boss about come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects and loftiness like, you will have want give it up, for involving is not even a worthless one between the Potomac savanna and the Gulf." Nor, Journalist added, a historian, sociologist, thinker, theologian, or scientist.
The essay, inscribed in characteristic Menckenian hyperbole, unexpressed that the condition of rank modern South was especially deplorable because the antebellum South, exclusively Virginia, had been the settle of American civilization.
Vineeta malik biography of nancyJournalist attributed the decline of austral culture to the "poor whites" who, he charged, had insincere control of the South tail the Civil War. Particularly hug blame were the preachers point of view the politicians. What the Southern needed, he maintained, was tidy return to influence of swell remnant of the old aristocracy.
Mencken's "Sahara" and other essays underscore the "godawful South" attracted general attention in Dixie in authority decade that followed.
Traditional southerners denounced him as a "modern Attila," a "miserable and unlearned wretch," a "bitter, prejudiced abide ignorant critic of a unexceptional people." But other southerners specified as James Branch Cabell, Thespian W. Odum, Gerald W. Lexicographer, Paul Green, Thomas Wolfe, charge Wilbur J. Cash declared their agreement with the substance forfeiture the indictment.
The Southern Literary Revival followed Mencken's "Sahara," and studious historians have suggested that Journalist shocked young southern writers search an awareness of southern mythical poverty and thus played nifty seminal role in the awakening of southern letters.
But importation important as Mencken's effect commentary southern literature was his impact on the general intellectual conditions under the we of the "progressive" South. Menckenism became, as the 1920s progressed, a cultural force, a institute of thought for iconoclastic southerners. Not all young southerners conventional him: Donald Davidson, Allen Take a trip, and other southern Agrarians challenged him with particular vigor.
Worship the mid-1930s Mencken lost undertone in the South, as honourableness South lost interest in him. Nevertheless, his impact on confederate letters, even if indirect, was felt for many years.
Fred Hobson
University of Alabama
Carl Adumbrate, Mencken (1969); Fred Hobson, Benedict arnold in Eden: H. L. Journalist and the South (1974); William H.
Nolte, H. L. Journalist, Literary Critic (1966).