Journalist, muckraker, political gadfly, atheist, and conservative dissident, H.L. Mencken "was to the first part of the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the last part of the nineteenth--the quintessential voice of American letters." So says the eminent critic Terry Teachout in this landmark biography, which explores why Mencken has been largely forgotten today.

Mencken held to ideas that history was busily sweeping aside. He railed against the growing power of the federal government in the early years of the Roosevelt administration, insisting on an elitist brand of politics that favored the "superior man." He advocated an isolationist course in world affairs, even as totalitarian powers swallowed up whole nations; he agitated against progressive domestic causes; and, albeit ironically, he proposed that capital punishment be turned into a public entertainment. Yet he wrote some of the best, most cruelly entertaining journalism of his time, reporting on great trials, minor crimes, and political conventions, skewering received opinion.

Mencken was "something more than a memorable stylist, if something less than a wise man," Teachout concludes. This careful portrait--the first full-length biography to appear in more than 30 years--gives ample evidence for that verdict. --Gregory McNamee


From Publishers Weekly
There is no lack of material on the curmudgeonly early-20th century journalist, and a devotee could spend years wading through Mencken's three-volume autobiography, two early biographies, and essays in the scholarly journal Menckeniana. However, Teachout simplifies the process for the casual reader, distilling the weight of information on Mencken into a tidy, fascinating biography that has much of the neat phrasing and sly wit that the rancorous writer displayed himself. Organized chronologically, the book follows the fat baby (Mencken noted that if cannibalism hadn't been abolished in his home state of Maryland, he'd have "butchered beautifully"), the teenage cub reporter, the editor and finally the memoirist. By drawing on published works and recently discovered private papers, Teachout puts the skeptic into context, giving as much insight into the Jazz Age as into the writer who hated jazz. Whether describing the quirks of novelist Theodore Dreiser, the rise of the pulp magazine, or the importance of the Scopes trial, the author brings deeper understanding to Mencken's passionate diatribes, and shows that the journalist was not just a product of his times, but a shaper of its attitudes. Although Teachout, a music critic for Commentary, obviously has an avid fascination for and admiration of the man who was determined to take on "braggarts and mountebanks, quacks and swindlers, fools and knaves," this is not a hagiography. He shows that Mencken could be both a fool and a knave, and even an occasional braggart. Yet he was always honest in his opinions, and Teachout's treatment of the material honors that journalistic impulse.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Teachout, who discovered and edited A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, draws on the acidulous author's private papers to write this biography. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) was the cigar-chomping, cynical newspaperman, but the lifelong Baltimorean was no mere archetype. A voracious reader before landing his first newspaper job at 19, he forged a vigorous style by mixing accurately used big words, common diction, and the occasional crystal-clear neologism into a colorful medium of analysis and vituperation. His passions were modern American literature and classical music (he was a good amateur pianist); his betes noirs religion, Puritanism, and politicians. He trumpeted Huckleberry Finn as the greatest American novel, "discovered" F. Scott Fitzgerald, made the anti-evolutionist Scopes trial notorious, railed against FDR, and denounced hypocrisy during his long career. Many of his books were best-sellers; the autobiographies Happy Days and Newspaper Days and the self-selected A Mencken Chrestomathy are accepted, if seldom-taught, American classics. Teachout, editor of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1995), writes an engrossing, sympathetic biography, despite concluding that Mencken was anti-Semitic (he certainly kept it under wraps, though) and the fact that Mencken was self-admittedly undersexed. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
In our media-saturated age, where countless pundits and commentators drone on endlessly, saying little, it's refreshing to rediscover H. L. Mencken, whose unique style, brilliant wit, and withering criticism made him one of America's most influential writers and thinkers during the first half of the 20th century. Terry Teachout's biography is an enormously well researched and engaging journey from Mencken's boyhood in Baltimore through his days as a cub reporter to his founding of The American Mercury (one of the most influential magazines of the 1920s) and his eventual fall from prominence.

Best known for his lifelong association with The Baltimore Sun as an editor and columnist, Mencken was a critic with wide-ranging interests and no shortage of passionately held opinions (on FDR: "He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes"). Mencken was equally comfortable (and caustic) writing about politics as he was in the realm of literature and the performing arts; and he helped introduce the American public to the likes of Joseph Conrad and Sinclair Lewis, as well as nurturing the early works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather.

Teachout does a masterful job of putting Mencken's long career in the context of his times, including an unflinching analysis of Mencken's anti-Semitism and outspoken antipathy to American entry into World War II, as well as his controversial views on art and love. The Skeptic is a fascinating introduction to a contradictory figure who, in his day, was considered American's greatest journalist but who could never be called anything less than honest. Winter 2002 Selection

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"When H.L. Mencken talked, everyone listened - like it or not. In the Roaring Twenties, he was the one critic who mattered, the champion of a generation of plain-speaking writers who redefined the American novel, and the ax-swinging scourge of the know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he dubbed the "booboisie." Some loved him, others loathed him, but everybody read him." "From his carefree days as a teenage cub reporter in turn-of-the-century Baltimore to his noisy tenure as founding editor of the American Mercury, the most influential magazine of the twenties, Mencken distinguished himself with a contrary spirit, a razor-sharp wit (he coined the term "Bible Belt"), and a keen eye for such up-and-coming authors as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He covered everything, form the Scopes evolution trial to the 1948 presidential elections, in the pages of the Baltimore Sun. He wrote bestselling books about the failure of democracy, the foibles of the female sex, and what he memorably called "the American language." But his favorite topic was the one he saw wherever he looked: the sterile, life-denying strain of puritanism that he believed was strangling the culture of his native land." "No modern writer has been more controversial than J. L. Mencken. His fans saw him as the fearless leader of the endless battle against ignorance and hypocrisy, while his enemies dismissed him as a cantankerous, self-righteous ideologue. The surging popularity of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the politician he hated most, eventually caused his star to fade, but the unsparing vigor of his critique of American life and letters - and the raucously colloquial prose style in which he blasted the Babbitts - retains its freshness and relevance to this day." Terry Teachout has combed through reams of Mencken's private papers, including the searingly candid autobiographical manuscripts sealed after his death in 1956. Out of this material he ha

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

H.L. Mencken was the greatest gadfly American journalism has ever known. Author by his own estimate of 5 million words, he used many of them to attack biblical fundamentalists, Franklin Roosevelt and the credulous American public, which he christened "the booboisie." So raucous a figure rarely meets with biographical subtlety, but in BOOK contributor Teachout's superb and genial work, Mencken becomes more nuanced and self-contradictory, and because of it, more comprehensible. Teachout has the wisdom to notice what Mencken never seemed to, the odd contrast between his personal tranquillity and the public uproar he made in print: "He chipped away at the cornerstones of the culture that had made possible the bourgeois comfort in which he delighted." Except for the five years during which he was married, Mencken lived with his mother in the Baltimore house where he was born, writing ceaselessly using a staccato two-fingered typing process "that made him look like a bear cub imitating a drum majorette." Mencken is so colorful that any competent biographer could have produced a readable book merely by aping the vigor of his style. But Teachout, while brilliantly evoking Mencken, maintains his own sensibility and judgment. The result￯﾿ﾽgenerous but exact￯﾿ﾽis a work that deserves to be widely read. Author￯﾿ﾽPenelope Mesic

Book Magazine - Penelope Mesic

H.L. Mencken was the greatest gadfly American journalism has ever known. Author by his own estimate of 5 million words, he used many of them to attack biblical fundamentalists, Franklin Roosevelt and the credulous American public, which he christened "the booboisie." So raucous a figure rarely meets with biographical subtlety, but in BOOK contributor Teachout's superb and genial work, Mencken becomes more nuanced and self-contradictory, and because of it, more comprehensible. Teachout has the wisdom to notice what Mencken never seemed to, the odd contrast between his personal tranquillity and the public uproar he made in print: "He chipped away at the cornerstones of the culture that had made possible the bourgeois comfort in which he delighted." Except for the five years during which he was married, Mencken lived with his mother in the Baltimore house where he was born, writing ceaselessly using a staccato two-fingered typing process "that made him look like a bear cub imitating a drum majorette." Mencken is so colorful that any competent biographer could have produced a readable book merely by aping the vigor of his style. But Teachout, while brilliantly evoking Mencken, maintains his own sensibility and judgment. The result—generous but exact—is a work that deserves to be widely read.

Publishers Weekly

There is no lack of material on the curmudgeonly early-20th century journalist, and a devotee could spend years wading through Mencken's three-volume autobiography, two early biographies, and essays in the scholarly journal Menckeniana. However, Teachout simplifies the process for the casual reader, distilling the weight of information on Mencken into a tidy, fascinating biography that has much of the neat phrasing and sly wit that the rancorous writer displayed himself. Organized chronologically, the book follows the fat baby (Mencken noted that if cannibalism hadn't been abolished in his home state of Maryland, he'd have "butchered beautifully"), the teenage cub reporter, the editor and finally the memoirist. By drawing on published works and recently discovered private papers, Teachout puts the skeptic into context, giving as much insight into the Jazz Age as into the writer who hated jazz. Whether describing the quirks of novelist Theodore Dreiser, the rise of the pulp magazine, or the importance of the Scopes trial, the author brings deeper understanding to Mencken's passionate diatribes, and shows that the journalist was not just a product of his times, but a shaper of its attitudes. Although Teachout, a music critic for Commentary, obviously has an avid fascination for and admiration of the man who was determined to take on "braggarts and mountebanks, quacks and swindlers, fools and knaves," this is not a hagiography. He shows that Mencken could be both a fool and a knave, and even an occasional braggart. Yet he was always honest in his opinions, and Teachout's treatment of the material honors that journalistic impulse. Agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Teachout, who discovered and edited A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, draws on the acidulous author's private papers to write this biography. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The first full-scale biography in a generation of the great journalist, editor, and social critic (1880￯﾿ﾽ1956), extending and in some ways supplanting the ones that have come before it.

Time was when H.L. Mencken￯﾿ﾽs reporting was the standard against which other journalists measured their own work, with the result that American newspapers of the 1920s and ￯﾿ﾽ30s were full of second- and third-rate imitators of the master. That time has long passed, but New York Times contributor Teachout (City Limits, 1991), editor of the 1995 anthology A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, finds plenty of reasons to suggest that a Mencken revival is long overdue. What thinking person, after all, can deny Mencken￯﾿ﾽs scathing assessment of the still ascendant "Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions"? What student of contemporary politics would not find a sympathetic guide in a writer whose "sneers and objurations have been reserved exclusively for braggarts and mountebanks, quacks and swindlers, fools and knaves"? Good stuff, indeed, but, as Teachout bravely admits, there are as many reasons to condemn Mencken as to praise him. He subscribed all his life to a suburban brand of anti-Semitism, once describing a contributor to his American Mercury magazine, for instance, as "a Jew . . . of the better sort" and writing to an interviewer, "I don￯﾿ﾽt like religious Jews" (mind you, he added, "I don￯﾿ﾽt like religious Catholics and Protestants"). He overlooked the excesses of the Nazi regime until well into WWII, perhaps out of misguided loyalty to his German ancestors. Still, well-placed criticism aside, Teachout offers a portrait of Mencken thatemphasizes his extraordinary productivity￯﾿ﾽhe wrote 19 books, thousands of articles, essays, and reviews, and perhaps 100,000 letters while covering national politics for daily newspapers and editing two magazines￯﾿ﾽand his contributions to journalism and American letters alike.