biography
| name: |
Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1880–1956)
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| biography:
| Editor and writer, born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. He left school after his father's death (1899) to become a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald, later serving as drama critic, city editor, and then managing editor of the Baltimore Evening Herald. The newspaper folded in 1906 and he joined the Baltimore Sun, with which he remained associated as editor, columnist, or contributor for most of his career, but he also wrote for many other publications. Early on, he published studies of George Bernard Shaw (1905) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), both of whom he admired. During 1914–23, with George Jean Nathan, he co-edited a satirical magazine, The Smart Set. Together they founded the American Mercury (1924), a cultural magazine for ‘a civilized minority’, which Mencken co-edited for nine years. Social rebels admired his clever, iconoclastic attacks on the middle-class ‘booboisie’, prudery, and organized religion and politics. As a reviewer and critic he lambasted second-rate authors and championed such writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Joseph Conrad. Many of his essays and reviews were collected in Prejudices (6 vols, 1919–27). In a different vein, his detailed study, The American Language (1919), traced the developments of a distinctive American idiom. During the 1930s his cynicism and antipathy to the New Deal appeared less in tune with the times, and he turned more towards the past, writing three volumes of memoirs, beginning with Happy Days (1940). He also added two supplements to his American Language (1945–6). A stroke in 1948 left him incapacitated during his last years. |
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