Henry Louis Mencken
Pages Agreg-Ink consacrées à Mencken
"In my title I revive the word chrestomathy in its true sense of 'a collection of choice passages from an author or authors,' and ignore the late addition of espacially one compiled to assist in the acquirement of a language".
H.L.M, Preface
His career:
1899: reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald
1903: editor of the Morning Herald
1905: editor of the Evening Herald
1906-1910: part of the staff of the Baltimore Sun
1908: literary critic of the Smart Set
1910-1917 / 1920-1935: part of the staff of the Baltimore Evening Sun
1914-1923: co-editor of the Smart Set
1924-1933: editor (and founder) of the American Mercury
On the Web
A guide to Menken's Resources on the Web: http://www.io.com/~gibbonsb/mencken.html
The Mencken Society Home Page: http://www.mencken.org/
Search inside the book thanks to Amazon : here
A good introduction to Mencken on WikipediA
A point of view about Mencken : "The Atlantic online" about the "Sage of Baltimore". Excerpt: "To the nineteen-twenties H. L. Mencken was a dangerous iconoclast, the relentless and often ribald derider of what he called the booboisie; a man who consorted nightly with the works of Nietzsche and spent the day tracking down Americana for the inside pages of his "anti-American" Mercury (...) By the mid 1940s, Mencken had become infamous for sympathizing with the enemy in not one but two world wars."
A foreword to The Impossible H.L. Mencken (edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, 1991) by Gore Vidal
Scourge of the Booboisie: Weighing H.L. Mencken's legacy (A review of a recent book on Mencken: "The Skeptic - a life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout, New York: HarperCollins). Review by Jack Shafer.
Excerpt: " [...] Mencken always saved his sharpest barbs for politicians and governments, for censors and do-gooders, for meddlers and interlopers and prohibitionists who dragged down the superior man. His vociferous opposition to America’s entry into World War I cost him his newspaper gig at the Baltimore Sun and caused the powers that be to declare him an enemy of the state. The Justice Department shadowed him, and the War Department read his mail. Fearing the worst, Mencken buried his most confidential papers in his backyard. When he returned to public letters after the war, he claimed that the government did him a favor by liberating him from daily journalism and giving him the time to write five books [...]"
Other reviews of the same "Life of H.L. Mencken" in The Economist (A good hater); The Schooled vs. The Skeptic ("Laissezfaire books") by Wirkman Virkkala and a personal point of view (Who reads Mencken now?) by the same Wirkman Virkkala (obviously a fan of Mencken...)
Mencken's book on Nietzsche (1908) can be read on the following site: The Philosophy of Friedriech Nietzsche
An introduction to HLM on Nietzsche by Charles Bufe, with some interesting topics: similarities and differences between Nietzsche and Mencken, the misuse of Nietzsche, problems and strengths of Mencken's interpretation of Nietzsche.
Excerpt: "[...] Mencken almost certainly has contributed to the misunderstanding of Nietzsche's position on a number of issues, including race and class. While Nietzsche believed that naturally superior individuals could arise from any race and any economic class, Mencken's remarks on race in this volume, and his Social Darwinism, could easily lead readers to conclude the opposite; given that Mencken's comments are made in the context of a book explaining Nietzsche, readers could easily conclude that Nietzsche's views coincide with Mencken's, when in fact they do not. To cite the worst example of Mencken's racist remarks, on page 99, he states: 'The history of the hopelessly futile and fatuous effort to improve the negroes of the Southern United States by education affords one such proof [of it being "necessary" that there be "a class content to obey without fear or question"]. It is apparent, on brief reflection, that the negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains racial differentiation. ' [...]"
His books: a selection
• Ventures
into Verses, 1903 |
• Dictionary of Quotations, 1942 |
Bibliography
Everything on the SAES site: http://www.univ-pau.fr/saes/ (click on "concours" then "bibliographie")