Word: menckenisms
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DIED. Gerald White Johnson, 89, reporter, columnist and author of more than 30 books on Americans and U.S. history; in Baltimore. Johnson was on the Greensboro, N.C., Daily News when Critic H.L. Mencken spotted him as "the best editorial writer in the South." After joining the Baltimore Sun in 1926, Johnson spent 17 years as a liberal, optimistic foil to Mencken's contemptuous conservatism. It was often said that Johnson wrote some of his best editorials in less than ten minutes; he completed books with no less facility. Among them were This American People (1951) and the series America...
...this has, of course, had the predictable and unfortunate result of clouding what Gail Parker actually proposes, and it will continue to make it easy for torchbearers of the status quo to dismiss her ideas on the future of higher education as the ravings of "a female Mencken...
...serious reality, not only in backward places like Mexico and Iran but also in the U.S. Polls show that 90% of Americans believe in God and pray often, but most of the serious observations about this country are made by the other 10%. Nothing has changed since H.L. Mencken in the way that public commentators look at the reality of religious life...
When he was eleven, the tribe moved to an apartment just off Baltimore's Union Square, where that famous curmudgeon H.L. Mencken lived. The future "Observer" satirist was unaware of that, though today he suspects that Mencken was the elderly gentleman who one day called the cops to chase Baker and some fellow ballplayers out of the square. In high school, young Russell was well liked, athletic (he ran the quarter mile) and showed promise as a humorist with a senior-year essay...
DIED. Charles Angoff, 77, novelist, critic, educator and sole editorial associate of H.L. Mencken on the sassy literary monthly American Mercury; of cancer; in New York City. In 1925 Russian-born Angoff was chosen by Mencken over 61 applicants to assist him at the newborn Mercury. Angoff stayed on for 25 years, becoming, in Mencken's view, "the best managing editor in America." Angoff later published eleven novels about Jewish-American life, as recounted by a fictional alter ego named David Polonsky. In one of them Angoff savages a Mencken-esque "literary dictator of America," portraying...