H. L. Mencken

Few writers roiled the American cultural scene like Henry Louis Mencken. Pathbreaking journalist, trenchant social observer, and unbridled humorist, Mencken was the most provocative and influential cultural critic of the last century. To read him today is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as our own, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness. In the six volumes of Prejudices published between 1919 and 1927, Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy, and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York. Now, The Library of America restores the full text of Mencken's landmark work to print in a deluxe two- volume boxed set, ensuring that new generations of readers can rediscover his one-of-a-kind genius. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

He was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, and the six collections of his essays and reviews published between 1919 and 1927 as his *Prejudices* are among his most entertaining reading. American satirist and critic HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN (1880-1956) believed that criticism rose to the level of art when it was used as a springboard for the critic's own philosophizing on art and culture. In this Third Series of *Prejudices, * first published in 1922, he brings his unique-and uniquely witty-perspective to such essays as: - "On Being an American" - "Footnote on Criticism" - "Das Kapital" - "Star-Spangled Men" - "The Poet and His Art" - "The Nature of Liberty" - "The Novel" - "The Forward-Looker" - "Types of Men" - "The Dismal Science" - "Matters of State" - "Reflections on the Drama" - and more.

H. L. Mencken was one of the leading literary, social, and cultural critics of the 1910s, '20s, and '30s. However, very few of his literary reviews have been reprinted in any form prior to their appearance in this volume. H. L. Mencken on American Literature presents a comprehensive selection of Mencken's reviews of the leading American writers of his time. Manifestly interested in establishing a canon of American literature, he took great pains to vaunt writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and James Branch Cabell as the most accomplished authors of the day. At the same time, he found deficiencies in the work of such highly regarded figures as Edith Wharton, W. D. Howells, and Ambrose Bierce, placing them only in the second rank of American writers. Mencken also considered it his function to demolish the popular work of now-forgotten best-selling writers, demonstrating in his inimitably scathing manner the degree to which their catering to a mass audience rendered their work hollow and subliterary. Mencken's reviews are a vast and untapped source for his provocative analyses of the best and the worst in American literature. They are presented here in a scrupulously edited and annotated edition.

The decisive influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on H. L. Mencken is readily acknowledged in the vast literature on the great American journalist and social critic. However, Mencken's 1908 study of the philosopher has been relegated to footnote status by Mencken's critics and biographers and has been largely ignored by Nietzsche scholars. There are good reasons for reversing this judgment. Mencken's work was one of the first comprehensive and sympathetic treatments of Nietzsche's thought in the English language. It is a provocative engagement with the German philosopher's complex and elusive ideas, enhanced by a style that reverberates with a verve and dynamism approaching Nietzsche's own. Mencken presents a view of Nietzsche that elucidates the latter's complex and contentious form of the "gospel of individualism" while evincing a keen appreciation of his unrivalled capacity for critical analysis. The historical scope of Nietzsche's thought is fully evident in Mencken's analysis as is its application to modern societies and politics. In tracing the biographical and intellectual impetus for Nietzsche's relentless attacks on conventional moralities and established modes of thought, Mencken discerned both an ideal and a method for grappling with social and cultural issues that remain salient in our own time.

The anthology that spans an entire lifetime of writing by America's greatest curmudgeon, with a "flick of mischief on nearly every page."

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.