Word: menckenism
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Since Henry Louis Mencken died at 75 nine months ago (TIME, Feb. 6), his prowess as editor, critic and scholar has inspired many a praiseful chorus. Last week Mencken's own voice floated out of the past to re-create his sparkle as a conversationalist and his flinty views on a range of targets-including his own craft. The Library of Congress issued two long-playing records ($7.50) of an interview made for its files by Mencken and the Baltimore Sun's Donald H. Kirkley Sr. Taped in June 1948, only five months before a stroke ended...
...Mencken reminisces fondly over "a life that has never been matched on earth for romance": his lot as a young Baltimore newsman at the turn of the century, hungering for assignments, often working all night, happily going three days without sleep to cover the Baltimore fire of 1904. "You could no more have a 40-hour week for a good newspaper reporter," says Mencken, "than you could for an archbishop." Those were the days "when an oldtime ice-wagon-driver city editor might come down in the morning with a hangover and fire a man simply because...
...Mencken voice hardens at latter-day journalists, and he wonders querulously what the modern young reporter does with all his leisure: "I get the impression from the modern reporter that he doesn't really like his work. He wishes he were a druggist. The idea of a newspaper reporter with any self-respect playing golf is to me almost inconceivable. I hear that even printers now play golf. God Almighty, that's dreadful to think of." Other Mencken shafts...
Excruciatingly slow at his studies, Rex despaired of ever amounting to anything. Then he took part in a couple of school plays, and to his astonishment found himself applauded. His career was set, in a way that recalls H. L. Mencken's sour description of the sort of youth who generally gets stagestruck. "Is he," Mencken asked, "the alert, ingenious, ambitious young fellow? Is he ... the diligent reader, the hard student, the eager inquirer? No. He is, in the overwhelming main, the neighborhood fop and beau, the human clotheshorse, the nimble squire of dames. He seeks in the world...
...circulation from less than 500,000 to over 2,000,000 between 1915 and 1923 with the inspirational magic of success stories. In its time, American was the first to run Kipling's If and Edna Ferber's short stories, ranged in contributors from Skeptic H. L. Mencken to Booster Bruce Barton. When Editor Sumner Blossom took over in 1929, he announced, "Horatio Alger doesn't work here any more," and American turned itself into a family magazine. It went on thriving for years...