Word: mencken
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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...
When H.L. Mencken was asked, "Why, if you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, do you continue to live here?" he countered, "Why do people visit zoos...
...implication was clear: the speaker resided on top of the evolutionary scale; what better way to spend a life than laughing at the lower orders? Such was Mencken's amusement during the '20s and early '30s. It was a resentful, mocking epoch; Americans, disillusioned by World War I, were anxious to smash icons and uncover clay feet. In newspapers, magazines -the Smart Set and the American Mercury-and some 40 books, Mencken merrily blasted Christianity in general and the Bible Belt in particular. He satirized professors, savaged politicians and labeled the majority of Americans-i.e., anyone...
...that millions of Southerners hate grits and could not quote the King James if threatened with hellfire. Scholars often fail to see that actual Mississippi is related to Yoknapatawpha County only as the tones of the musical scales are related to the symphonies of Beethoven. Even the grating H.L. Mencken did not manage to cut through the spoon bread. After a smart assessment of the Sahara of the beauxarts, Mencken paused to mourn the passing of a more "cultured" South that existed only in legend. The old iconoclast had swallowed the antebellum myth almost whole. And so have the generations...
Understandably, there was a time when Farrell was a lodestar of the non-Communist left. His Studs Lonigan trilogy is a genre classic, a cluttered memoir of graceless Irish poor whose lyricism and potential are crushed in the struggle to survive. H.L. Mencken called their creator "the best living novelist," and Critic Alfred Kazin noted respectfully that "Farrell was the archetypal novelist of the crisis and its inflictions ... all the rawness and distemper of the thirties seem to live in [his] novels...