Word: menckenism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...World War II, as many a newsman proudly boasts, the best reported war in history? No, said crabby, square-rigged Henry Louis Mencken with characteristic sourness. In the opinion of Baltimore's aging (65) iconoclast, an old-newspaperman himself. World War II was covered wordily but not well...
...reported it, in pure Kiepurese: "The public love oss. They dizagree with the critics. The onjost critics hurts only wahn person-his poblisher and himself!" Wilson showed a flair for punch leads: "John Steinbeck said what the hell, he'd see me." He asked tart old H. L. Mencken at the Stork Club why he lived in Baltimore. Replied Mencken: "I need peace. I live in a remote slum surrounded by lintheads, okies and anthropoids ... far from where the respectable profiteers live." Earl Wilson's current ambition is to write "some thing serious, like John O'Hara...
Critic Henry L. Mencken slashed at U.S. smugness and provincialism and fixed the arbiters of its life and bad taste in a cruel epithet: the booboisie. And Poet E. E. Cummings mocked...
...production of doctors and mass practice and humbuggery of medicine, a romantic apotheosis of the medical scientist. Dodsworth (1929), the esthetic and amatory adventures of Samuel Dodsworth, automobile tycoon, and his wife in the cultured lands of Europe was a modern Innocents Abroad. Elmer Gantry (dedicated to Henry L. Mencken) was a rich caricature of a corrupt and ranting preacher (as he might appear to the village atheist). In The Man Who Knew Coolidge, a superb tour de force, Lewis used his remarkable talent for mimicking U.S. speech to let George F. Babbitt (this time called Lowell Schmaltz) reveal...
Woodrow Wilson: "a Presbyterian baboon"; Herbert Hoover: "a superior bookkeeper"; Harry Truman: "an 8th Ave. haberdasher"; Douglas MacArthur: "a big show-off"; Henry Mencken: "I guess I'm an old cadaver...