H. L. Mencken

Henry Louis ""H. L."" Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Mencken, known as the ""Sage of Baltimore”, is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century. “Mencken wrote nearly 250 letters, postcards, and telegrams to Hood. In this bright little volume, Peter Dowell includes slightly more than half of those missives. . . . [His] editing of the letters is in every way admirable, as is his introduction.” – American Spectator

H. L. Mencken stipulated that this memoir remain sealed in a vault for thirty-five years after his death. For good reason: My Life as Author and Editor is so telling and uproariously opinionated that it might have provoked a storm of libel suits. As he recounts his career as a critic, essayist, and editor of the ground-breaking magazine Smart Set, Mencken brings us face to face with the literary aristocracy of his day, from the dour womanizer Theodore Dreiser to F. Scott Fitzgerald, drowning his gifts in alcohol. Here, too, are the hacks, poseurs, and bohemian crackpots who flocked around them. Most of all, here is Mencken himself, defying censors and Prohibition agents with equal aplomb in an age when literature was a contact sport.

"The normal American of the 'pure-blooded' majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen."-H. L. Mencken, The Anglo-Saxon (1923)The Anglo-Saxon (1923), is an essay by H. L. Mencken in which he criticized Anglo-Saxonism, a belief system of late 19th century and early 20th century promoting the superiority of English-speaking nations. Mencken, although he considered himself of true Anglo-Saxon ancestry, thought the American Anglo-Saxon to be inferior and weak.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.