Word: menckenisms
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...MENCKEN by Carl Bode. 452 pages. Southern Illinois University...
...takes an effort of mind to recall the time, not so very long ago, when America was still something like a collection of small towns, and a provincial newspaperman named Henry Louis Mencken was its national cracker-barrel atheist. It is, moreover, a matter for wonder that Mencken, who dressed like the gallused boors he despised, chewed cigars like a Tammany clubhouse character and had tastes that ran to beer and bawdy jokes, was ever regarded as the epitome of metropolitan sophistication. The term smart set, which was the title of his first magazine, seems sadly unsmart today. The word...
Fundamentalism was on the defensive in the Roaring Twenties, and William Jennings Bryan, its principal spokesman, found himself under siege by the giants of the emerging Liberalism. He was attacked not only in the press by Henry Mencken and in the courtroom by Clarence Darrow, but even from the pulpit by a bright-eyed Baptist who had the temerity to question the virgin birth and the second coming of Christ...
...there is an every increasing obstacle in the way of all this happiness. As America sinks deeper into its illness, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep a step ahead of it. It is necessary to be sicker than Mencken was 40 years ago, sicker then Lenny Bruce was ten years ago, sicker than Philip Roth was last week...
...journalistic writing enough to satisfy his restless intellect? "Well," says Wills, "not in the sense that I'm going to give up writing about the classics. But many of the best writers in English have been journalists: Dickens, Macaulay, Johnson, Mencken, Twain, Mailer. Even today some of the best writing is in journalism-perhaps the best. In a world of specialists, somebody has to be a courier among specialties...