Word: mencken
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Though he spends his life poking fun at the foibles of mankind, he seldom makes a bitter remark about a friend. As an after dinner speaker, he is successful; but not at Rotary Clubs. I think of him as a combination of H. L. Mencken and Martin Luther. Yet he is not fanatical in his humorous creeds. He is writing a serious novel in which he firmly believes, and has written a play which, he tells us, was neither humorous, serious nor good; but then, Mr. Stewart, among many other things, is a modest...
What voyages may be undertaken on this curious pleasure cruiser! What a pity that Gelett Burgess and Theodore Dreiser cannot be given adjacent cabins and sent off for a good long argument to the Malay Peninsula. I should suggest that Dr. Frank Crane and H. L. Mencken he included in that party; then, to complete it, Ben Hecht, D. H. Lawrence and Justice Ford. What a happy time they would all have! Seriously, what could be better in warm weather like this, than a shipload of conveniently opposed viewpoints, outside the three-mile limit, with a fair breeze...
...Mencken's theories of the " American language " met the ridicule of speakers before the Conference of British and American Professors of English at Columbia. Dr. Henry Van Dyke of Princeton referred to the suggestion of an American language as being either " a specimen of American humor " or " a serious enormity." Dr. F. N. Scott, of Michigan, speaking of Mr. Mencken's translation of the Declaration of Independence said: " That Mr. Mencken has failed to perceive the gulf between the sterile vulgarity of his performance and the massive dignity of the original, is for Americans not a matter...
...Critics. H. L. Mencken: " The first novel of Washington life that attempts to describe genuinely typical Washingtonians and the essential Washington...
...Supreme Court of New York, like Polonius, had a daughter. One day, so the story goes, he caught her reading D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. It is a very long novel, an erudite and obscure novel, and some critics say - among them H. L. Mencken - a very dull novel. But unquestionably it has some erotic passages which are intelligible to the sophisticated intelligentsia, Whether they were understood by his daughter or not Justice Ford did not say; whether her mind was corrupted by them he did not try to ascertain. But Justice Ford, being a lawyer...