Word: menckenisms
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Editor Van Doren has tried to include big, smart or portentous figures of the last 20 years. Some of those present: Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, Willa Gather, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Evelyn Scott, Edith Wharton, Glenway Wescott, Thornton Wilder. Readers may raise puzzled eyebrows at lesser-known names: Carl Becker, Albert Halper, Eleanor Rowland Wembridge. Nowhere to be found are such names as Upton Sinclair, Conrad Allen, Hervey Allen, Louis Bromfield, Walter Lippmann, T. S. Stribling. Looking back...
There are still flashes of the old Mencken: "This moral reformer is a creature peculiar to relatively civilized societies; among savages he would be recognized instantly for the public enemy that he is, and disposed of out of hand." He speaks of Bolshevism and Fascism as "the new non-Euclidean theologies." Of the Catholic Church and its flock he writes jovially: "The whip it cracks over them is barbed with the fear of Hell, but the cracking is done with infinite discretion, and a fine understanding of psychology as she blows in the lower IQ brackets." But the necessities...
TREATISE ON RIGHT & WRONG-H. L. Mencken-Knopf ($3). Not many years ago Henry Louis Mencken was the god of U. S. liberal undergraduates, his lightest obiter dicta the unquestioned orders of their day. With a new. generation his authority has waned until now he appears an old-fashioned orthodox heretic. The men-of-straw he buffeted to the yelling delight of his admirers have by this time had such a bludgeoning that they look more like scarecrows than opponents. But he still goes on pounding the stuffing out of bogeymen that once seemed giants. Treatise on Right & Wrong...
...incident is important as a clue to what will happen when the depression has lasted long enough to reduce the entire national corps of creative artists to the status of Government pensioners. Lugubrlous as the prospect is, it is not without its attractions: Mr. Mencken drawing a weekly stipend for turning out D.A.R. brochures, Senor Rivera naturalized and dotting the public parks of the land with equestrian General Pershings, a qualified muralist doing over the replastered Dartmouth Library walls with an "I pledge Allegiance to My Flag" motif . . . and subsidized humorists doing what they can with...
...Mencken is now enjoying a vacation cruise about Europe. On his return to the United States early in April he will publish his new book "Treatise on Right and Worng". This is a study of man's moral and ethical ideas since the dawn of history. No part of it has heretofore been published in magazines or newspapers...