Word: mencken
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fascinated with his own insider status, and the diary at times reads like a "Who's Who" of American politics, literature, medicine and academia. Despite the fact that Mencken ordered the diary sealed after his death, these are very much the public reminiscences of a very public...
...text of the diary--Mencken the man--is harder to decode. Though the one-time founder and editor of the American Mercury was a literary critic who prided himself on sifting through other writers' pomposity, he seemed to find his own methods of criticism strangely removed from his life. Rarely does he present in the diary the introspective or self-critical ponderings that mark so many other diaries...
...picture of Mencken, albeit an often self-contradictory one, does emerge in the pages of this record of his life from 1930 to 1948. Mencken, as he wrote in this most private of forums, was a husband proud of his solicitousness and a hypochondriac; a wealthy man obsessed by money; a writer intrigued by the failings of his colleagues and competitors...
...Mencken was really a man of his times, and despite his reputation as a vitriolic critic of American hypocrisy and greed, he shared more than a little intellectual common ground with those who perpetuated a status quo based on race, class, gender and religious bias...
This facet of the diary, more than any other, has prompted comment and dismay from the current standard-bearers of the literary establishment, who have launched a lively controversy in the pages of such mass circulation journals as the New York Review of Books about the Mencken legacy in American letters. There are those who suggest it should be revised in light of his retrograde social views...