Word: menckenly
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...second printing, and while it has not yet matched Bloom's and Hirsch's sales, it is a brisk seller and has sparked spirited debate over its thesis. America, Jacoby says, is producing no young crop of heirs to the great public writer-thinkers like H.L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, whose works set directions and standards 60 and 70 years ago. Nor, he notes, have successors emerged for the current senior generation of broad-gauge university scholars like David Riesman, John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Bell, with their insights on society and the economy...
...complaint of the dilettante: envy. Gaping at the writers headed for the Algonquin Round Table, she "longed to know such people, share their brilliance, know what they took to be important. She wondered if she could hold her own with Bob Sherwood and George Jean Nathan and Woollcott and Mencken, but she would probably never meet them...
America's native writing style developed--at a penny a word--in the highly degradable pulp pages of this monthly. At no extra cost, Black Mask came wrapped in an irony. It was founded with $500 in 1920 by the journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken and the playwright George Jean Nathan as a way of financing the unprofitable Smart Set, their magazine of uptown wit and sophisticated prose. The "louse," as Mencken called his detective journal, was an immediate success, and in six months he sold it for $100,000, the price of 10 million words...
...consider my newest book, Barrier Island, as hard-boiled fiction," says John D. MacDonald. "It's about a land scam in islands off the Mississippi coast." The detective story is one of the few fiction forms that deal directly with the seamier side of American life. To improvise on Mencken, himself an American institution no less secure than the one he launched with Black Mask, no one ever went broke overestimating the appetite for that...
...national politics and foreign affairs that is usually matched only by much larger papers. During the Mexican War, the Sun used a string of riders to bring the latest dispatches to Baltimore on horseback, scooping its competitors and even the White House. In 1925 the Sun assigned H.L. Mencken to write his famous series of articles on the historic Tennessee "monkey trial" of John Scopes, who stood accused of teaching evolution in public classrooms. Under the leadership of Reg Murphy, who has been publisher since 1981, the Sun has maintained a reputation for excellence. Last year its reporters...