Word: menckens
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...time of literary rebellion which came like a rude but welcome belch after a dull and heavy meal. Among the loudest belchers were famed Critics H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At a Manhattan party one night, "Red" Lewis drunkenly embraced Mencken and Nathan and yelled: "So you guys are critics, are you? Well, let me tell you something. I'm the best goddam writer in this here goddam country . . ." Next day, after reading the proofs of Main Street, Mencken wrote to Nathan: "Grab hold of the bar-rail, steady yourself, and prepare for a terrible shock . . . That...
Over the years, EB has assembled a formidable array of authors. Lord Macaulay is still there with his article on Sam Johnson; so is Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, with his piece on Mary, Queen of Scots. Einstein has written on spacetime, and H. L. Mencken on Americanism; Shaw wrote on socialism, Trotsky on Lenin. But Editor Yust sometimes travels far from the world of doctorates and Nobel Prizes. For his expert on nightclubs, he picked the Stork Club's Sherman Billingsley; for boxing, Gene Tunney; for rodeo, Cowboy "Foghorn" Clancy...
Disturber of the Peace, by William Manchester. A brisk if not fully penetrating biography of H. L. Mencken; best when it lets Mencken himself do the talking (TIME...
Aviation to Xylophones. By the middle '30s, Mencken's influence had begun to fade. Mencken was as much the victim of the depression as the shivering vagrant to whom he once gave his overcoat on Times Square. He refused to take the depression seriously: "What goes up must come down. [That's] all the economic theory worth knowing." But a frightened and hungry U.S. public had no stomach for ridicule, and ridicule had always been the popular basis for the Mencken boom. By the late '30s, many bright young people barely knew who Mencken...
...spite of his obvious hero worship, Biographer Manchester makes an honest if superficial effort to explain Mencken's decline as a critic of manners, morals and letters. But he still leaves undone the harder job of explaining just what made Mencken tick. Like every other book on Mencken to date, Disturber of the Peace is at its best and most informative when it quotes from its subject's own machete-swinging prose...