Word: menckens
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Concludes Mayer: "Frequently, as I observe ... the good receipts for what good people call bad pictures, and the bad receipts for what they call good, I am reminded of Henry Mencken's sour dictum: 'No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public...
...Mencken...
...Colonial Records of New England, searched back issues of The New Yorker and TIME, followed Li'l Abner for months. He read the diaries of Cotton Mather and those of a Civil War housewife in Montgomery, Ala. He consulted scholars and experts, from H. L. (The American Language") Mencken down to a lifer in a federal prison who told him about the real McCoy (from the real Macao-the uncut heroin smuggled in from the Portuguese island colony of Macao...
...year-old son Day was to marry, the boy's fiancée eloped with his best friend. When the newlyweds returned, the two boys whipped out revolvers and killed each other. In 1901, Bierce's second son died of pneumonia. Bierce, who later told H. L. Mencken he kept the ashes of one son in a cigar box, uttered a stoic "nothing matters," but weeks passed before he could write a line. When few bought his collected works (1909-12), he knew he was a has-been...
...harsh. Though much of Bierce is intellectual dandruff from an unkempt ego, the best of the wit still sparkles, and a few true-eyed Civil War tales are at least as durable as war. Biographer Fatout fails to indicate the company Bierce keeps-Poe, Melville, Stephen Crane, H. L. Mencken-the slender, off-key tradition of pessimism in American life & letters. "Why should I remain in a country that is on the eve of woman's suffrage and prohibition?" sulked Bierce in 1912. The old (71) soldier wanted to see if Pancho Villa and his Mexicans could shoot straight...