First published 2002
Terry Teachout examines H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist who became America's most influential literary critic during the 1920s. Mencken championed writers like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald while attacking what he called the "booboisie" with his razor-sharp wit. As founding editor of the American Mercury, he covered everything from the Scopes trial to presidential elections for the Baltimore Sun. He wrote bestselling books attacking democracy and what he saw as American puritanism. Teachout draws from Mencken's private papers and sealed autobiographical manuscripts to reveal the man behind the public persona. The book traces Mencken's career from teenage reporter to his decline during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. Teachout shows how Mencken's fearless attacks on ignorance and hypocrisy made him both beloved and despised, capturing his role as intellectual gadfly, working newspaperman, devoted husband, and unfaithful lover in Depression-era America.
Genres: biography, 20th-century, american, criticism
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: biography, intellectual-history
Setting: Baltimore, America
Period: 1920s, Great Depression
432 pages · Hardcover · HarperCollins