Word: fecher
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MENCKEN: A STUDY OF HIS THOUGHT by Charles A. Fecher Knopf; 391 pages...
...readers joined the tirade. The newspaperman was elevated to social arbiter, literary critic and political savant. Even today, 22 years after his death, Mencken is remembered as the Sage of Baltimore, a pantheon figure in American letters. It is time for someone else to play the iconoclast. Charles Fecher, himself a Baltimore journalist, performs the task unwittingly in his amusing literary biography, Mencken: A Study of His Thought...
...labeled Dixie the Sahara of the Bozart. And his classic encyclopedia, The American Language, brilliantly traced the wellsprings of slang and ethnic argot. But in larger matters he was more naive than the booboisie. When real goose-steppers came along, Mencken failed to perceive the German danger and, as Fecher notes, "brushed off Nazi treatment of the Jews." His literary criticism was sometimes blind to contemporary talent: he thought Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was "full of pink hooey" and found no more sense in Faulkner than in "the wop boob, Dante." He never understood the scars...