Word: menckenism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pivotal Interview. Manchester immediately went to work, focusing on the period of Nov. 20-25, 1963. The author of two well-received biographies (of H. L. Mencken and the Rockefeller family) and four indifferently received novels-none of which came close to bestsellerdom-he halted work on a book about Germany's vast Krupp industrial empire, set up shop in a cubicle in Washington's National Archives building. Next door was Evelyn Lincoln, J.F.K.'s White House secretary...
...intimidated by the problem of white flannels, would have his Dacron boxer shorts laundered by the staff of the Americana Hotel. Sinclair Lewis' The Man Who Knew Coolidge would be hospitalized for logorrhea long before his train reached Bumpkinsville. The provincialism of Gopher Prairie and booster clubs, of Mencken's "booboisie" and Lewis' Babbittry, which believed that the outside world began at the end of Main Street and thought of Dante as "that Dago poet," is as dead as the America of button shoes and chicken every Sunday...
...many books on proper English usage already exist-Strunk, Fowler, Jespersen, Evans, Mencken-that the appearance of yet another is a case of meeting an unfelt need. One dependable authority in this field, like one telephone company, should be enough, and the English-speaking world has had one since British Lexicographer Henry...
Some of the performances, however, nearly transcend their material. Jack Cassidy as the gossip columnist Max Mencken is unbelievably slick and professional. Michael O'Sullivan hams to a proper excess as a ten-time Nobel Prize loser who takes revenge on the world by trying to destroy its culture-hero, Superman. Bob Holiday's deadpan makes him perfect for the title role...
Reading the Advocate Anthology is like re-reading your freshman Gen Ed papers three years later; it simply embarrasses you. The best work is outrageously derivative; you suffer for Thomas Huxley or H.L. Mencken or Henry Miller or whoever was being imitated. The worst causes real anguish; only Harvard undergraduates could write so much oddly-arranged verse with obscure Latin titles or such dogged, tedious, unknowingly funny short stories...