Word: menckenisms
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...this doesn't mean that Crouse's book is fit reading only for those newspaper freaks who must know where H.L. Mencken and Russell Baker went to high school. Crouse has a good angle on history. His behind-the-scenes view of McGovern's defeat gives a key to some of the man's personal qualities--an embarrassing candor and an inability to remain detached or be "political"--that figured in his failure...
...this late date, the yielding up of an imperial crown for the hand of Wallis Warfield Simpson cannot remotely claim the urgency and import that H.L. Mencken once assigned to it when he called it "the greatest story since the Resurrection." Ryton is a slave to the egalitarian fallacy-namely, that under the trappings of royalty lie simple everyday souls who have their ups and downs just like thee...
Willa Cather was born 100 years ago. This novel, reissued in a handsome centenary edition, first appeared in 1923 when the author was 50 and doing her best work. H.L. Mencken had called her a great novelist. Edmund Wilson, a young whippersnapper in those days, conceded that she was one of the few who could bring "distinction" to the Middle West: "that meager and sprawling scene." Not even he was aware that at that very moment the post-World War I generation-Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner-were sealing the door on Cather's kind of reverent regionalism...
Throughout, Wilson holds to the aim he set for himself as a young critic: "Try to contribute something new or call attention to some neglected aspect . . ." An example of the latter is Wilson's emphasis on Mencken's habitual confusion in thinking and his dogmatic German brutality . . . We never expected coherence of Mencken. He was a poet in prose and a humorist...
Ever since the ancient Indian game was introduced in Baltimore, it has been as much a local institution as crab cakes and H.L. Mencken. Each spring the city's schoolboys break out their lacrosse sticks the way kids in other cities limber up with Louisville Sluggers. At Johns Hopkins, foremost of the more than 100 U.S. colleges now competing in the sport, lacrosse is the No. 1 athletic attraction, drawing twice as many spectators as football and basketball combined. Thus it is no surprise that the Blue Jays enter the first round of the N.C.A.A tournament this week with...