Word: menckenism
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...Baltimore, soon after the general elections of 1948, Henry Louis Mencken suffered a severe stroke that damaged his power of speech and his ability to read and write. But it left his remarkable mind unimpaired and isolated. Two years later a massive coronary occlusion brought him once more to the verge of death. In the brick row house on Rollins Street where he had spent nearly all his life, Mencken sank, fighting, into the twilight of aphasia. It was a cruel fate for a man of Mencken's measure, and in his anguish he rebelled against it. This week...
...death will send a twinge of nostalgia to many a middle-aged American-a feeling which will be difficult to explain to his son or daughter. A generation ago, Mencken's passing would have caused wholesale sorrow in certain speakeasies and newspaper city rooms. College students would have cut classes for a day to mourn the loss of the stormiest figure on the U.S. conversational scene. And in many a parish house and political forum, his death would have been considered...
...Mencken was an editor of surpassing skill, a journalist of scintillating brilliance, a rare humorist and a savage critic. For years he was the brightest star on the Baltimore Sunpapers. He was the forward lance in the march of American letters from John Fox Jr. (The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come) to Sinclair Lewis, helped kill off much of the trash in American writing. Many of the best U.S. writers of the century (Lewis, Dreiser, Cather, Pound. Fitzgerald) were discovered or trundled by Mencken in his happy days as co-editor (with George Jean Nathan) of the Smart...
What a shame that a novelist with the narrative ability of Herman Wouk should use it to advocate the intellectually obnoxious doctrines of conservatism, conformity, mediocrity, orthodoxy, discipline, authority and obedience. The great novelists were tormented with difficult questions; Wouk has easy answers. In the '20s, H. L. Mencken would have laughed him off the library shelves...
...Herman Shumlin's able supervision, there are plenty of vivid snapshots and plenty of lively moments, but the play provides no sustained drama. And what does seem fictional seems all too much so: a vapid love story between Scopes and a hard-shell preacher's daughter; a Mencken who talks more like a smarty-pants cribbing from the real Mencken's prose. But if Inherit the Wind is not quite up to snuff as a play, it is often effective theater...